A Tokoroa couple have been jailed after starving a man with cerebral palsy to death

Jovander Raymond Terry and Annie Matthews took on the care of 55-year-old Bruce Rangitutia in 2014, after his mother died.

By December 2015 he was so dehydrated, he drank his own urine in the days before his death.

Herald reporter Sam Olley was in the Rotorua District Court for sentencing, where the judge said Terry showed an unparalleled degree of callousness.

Olley says Rangitutia lost 40 percent of his body weight in the time he lived with Terry and Matthews.

Terry's been sentenced to six years and seven months in prison and Mathews to four years, ten and a half months.