No-nonsense judge savages mother who made her son sleep naked in dog cage

A furious judge hit out at a mother who made her 13 year-old son sleep naked in a dog cage after she tried to defend herself.

Circuit Judge Sibley Reynolds was appalled when Danielle Nicole Martin 32, blamed the appalling child abuse she inflicted on ‘bad decisions and bad judgements.’

The exasperated judge snapped: ‘What you just said means to me that you let him use magic markers to write on the walls.

‘Unless you tell me what the color of the markers were and which wall he marked on, I’m not interested.

‘Now is the time for you to tell me what you did and make it right.’

But Martin, of Prattville in Alabama continued to offer self-pitying excuses, and moaned: ‘I had problems with my son for a long time, and I wasn’t getting the help I asked for.

‘Some decisions were made that shouldn’t have been made and I didn’t fight to stop some things that shouldn’t have happened.’

Judge Reynolds then interrupted her sniveling, asking: ‘Like chaining him to a padlock?’

Martin entered a blind plea to aggravated child abuse Thursday, meaning she admitted the crime without reaching a potential plea deal which could see her sentence shortened.

The cruel mother faces being jailed for up to 20 years when she is sentenced August 15, the Montgomery Advertiser reported.

Her abuse, which ended when police raided the home in September 2018, saw the boy chained and padlocked to a staircase, and made to live in a closet-type room.

He suffered the abuse for two years, and displayed signs of malnutrition by the time he was rescued.

Martin’s husband Joshua David Martin, 26, and her mother Vickie Seale Higgenbotham, 58, both denied child abuse charges Thursday.

The boy’s two uncles Douglas Gene Phillips, 83, and Matthew Allen Phillips, 29, also denied child abuse charges during the same hearing.