Cynthia Marie Randolph locked her two-year-old daughter Julie, and one-year-old son Cavanaugh, inside her car after they were misbehaving.
According to reports, the weather reached 36 degrees celsius outside, meaning inside the car would have been much hotter.
The two young children died of heat stroke.
According to police documents and reported by The Sun, the 25-year-old mum left her kids in the car, smoked marijuana and fell asleep.
When she was taken into custody she gave several different scenarios of what happened, which ranged from the kids were only in the car for a short time, they locked themselves inside and that they had disappeared from her sight and she didn't know they in the car.
But the young mum was eventually arrested and charged with two felony counts of injury to a child causing serious bodily injury.
Assistant District Attorney Kathleen Catania reportedly told court: 'Under our law, a person acts recklessly when they consciously disregard a substantial and unjustifiable risk that the result will occur.'
Assistant District Attorney Abby Placke added: 'We thought that the evidence supported a finding that she acted knowingly, which means that she knew that her actions were reasonably certain to cause the result, which, in this case, was her children's' deaths.'
Randolph was eventually found guilty of both charges and has been sentenced to 20 years behind bars for each count.
This article originally appeared on New Idea.
