A YOUNG woman who killed her father after he subjected her to intolerable violence and sexual abuse has walked free from a court.

Hazel Thomas was on the receiving end of another drunken beating from Stephen Akers, 50, when she grabbed a knife and stabbed him through the heart, a judge at Maidstone Crown Court heard.

But the 23-year-old mother was freed after Judge Andrew Patience, QC, decided that it was not in the public interest to send her to jail.

Thomas wept as she was given a three-year community rehabilitation order with a condition that she addresses her abuse of substances such as alcohol.

Thomas, formerly of Lorton Close, Gravesend, now of St John’s Road, Whitstable, denied murder and her guilty plea to manslaughter was accepted.

Jeremy Dein, QC, defending, submitted there were “a multitude of reasons” that it was a rare exceptional case in which Thomas should not be sent to prison.

“Bluntly, we maintain that Miss Thomas’s case has all the hallmarks of a battered wife syndrome type,” he said. “It was a worse scenario from her perspective. This in reality is a case of battered daughter syndrome.

“She consistently suffered emotional, physical and ultimately sexual oppression at the hands of Mr Akers from a young age to the moment he died.”