A Jamaican drug dealer who battered to death an innocent woman seven years after he should have been deported was jailed for more than 26 years at the Old Bailey today.

Lloyd Byfield, 48, used a claw hammer and kitchen knife to murder Leighann Duffy in her Walthamstow flat in front of a six-year-old child.

Judge Nicholas Cook told Byfield he may never be released from prison then launched a furious attack on Home Office failings.

Byfield had been allowed to stay in Britain after claiming that he had married in this country after arriving from Jamaica in 2000.

But he had a separate girlfriend whom he attacked with a chisel in 2004 and then carried out a knifepoint burglary.

Three years later Byfield was ordered to be deported but he remained free in London to murder Miss Duffy, another ex-girlfriend, out of jealousy last September.

Byfield inflicted 14 separate injuries to her and - when the child tried to intervene - Byfield struck her as well, the court heard.

He pleaded guilty to murder and was jailed for life and ordered to serve a minimum of 26 and a half years.

Said the judge: “You may never be released from prison. With your record and with regard to the circumstances of the offending the most careful consideration will need to be given in the event of your release ever being contemplated.

“You took a knife and a hammer to the scene of the killing. I have been told that you were in the habit of carrying it with you in connection with your trade as a drug dealer but I don’t regard that as significant mitigation.

“But it serves to illustrate how unwise it was for your continued presence in the jurisdiction to be tolerated after you had been convicted of an offence of serious violence on a woman.

“I don’t know if steps were taken then to minimise the risk you presented to women. It is in my view essential that when men are sentenced for such crimes of domestic violence the underlying risk to women is addressed.

“You were to be deported but for reasons that can’t be explained to me it was not activated and you were able to kill an innocent woman.

“You killed a woman in the presence of a six-year-old child. A good woman and when she must have realised that her end had come she thought of the child and told her to hide. When the child intervened you struck her – that required a heart of stone.”

He added: “This murder may have been prevented if systems had worked as they should have done.”

When Byfield gave himself up to police two weeks after the murder he claimed he had loved Ms Duffy “but love can make you do stupid things.”

Said the judge: “That’s not love. Love is loving and caring and cherishing, this was possessive brutality, mirroring a wholly wrong attitude to women.

“This is the pinnacle of domestic violence – a scourge that affects the lives of women and children.”

As Byfield, of no fixed address, was led to the cells members of Ms Duffy’s family yelled “scum” and “I hope you rot in hell.”