Child Laws

[Dvus4ever]

I read this in the paper this morning and was wondering what others views on the subject are. I know this happened in Europe, but if it happened here . . . would the outcome be any different?

British teens who killed toddler to be released from prison
06/22/2001

LONDON - Two teenagers who were 10 when they tortured and killed 2-year-old James Bulger will be released, the government announced today, despite a long campaign by the toddler's mother to keep them behind bars.

Both young men, now 18, will be given new identities, which a judge has barred the British media from disclosing.

The decision to release Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, announced in a written Parliamentary reply by Home Secretary David Blunkett, followed separate, secret parole board hearings this week to determine whether the pair remain a threat to society.

They have spent eight years in a secure children's unit, after being found guilty of abducting and murdering the 2-year-old in February 1993 in a case that gained international attention.

For the rest of their lives, Venables and Thompson will be "subject to strict license conditions and liable to immediate recall if there is any concern at any time about their risk," Blunkett said in his written statement.

The pair, who will turn 19 in August, went before parole panels that included a judge, psychiatrist and an independent member who examined reports from doctors and criminologists.

The possibility of their release had angered James' family, who insist that as two of Britain's most notorious killers, they have not been punished sufficiently.
"I do not want revenge, I just want justice," James' remarried mother, Denise Fergus, said in a statement this week.

A national debate has also broken out on what is more important – revenge for James' death or rehabilitation of his killers – and raised questions about the age of criminal responsibility in England.

The murder shocked the nation. Venables and Thompson, who were playing hooky from school, lured James from a shopping center in Bootle, near Liverpool, northern England as he waited outside a butcher's shop for his mother. A video camera captured pictures of the toddler being led away by the two older boys, and those scenes have been replayed countless times on British television.

The boys dragged and led the toddler two miles through town to a railway line, where they hit him with bricks and metal bars, poured paint in his eyes and finally placed him on the tracks where a train cut him in half.

In handing down the sentence, the trial judge described their crime as an act of "unparalleled evil and barbarity" and recommended the boys serve a minimum of eight years.

The sentence was later increased to 15 years by former home secretary Michael Howard, but in October a judge restored the original sentence, saying it would not be beneficial for the boys to be in the "corrosive atmosphere of an adult prison."

He also noted if the crime had been committed a few months earlier, they could not have been tried or punished by the courts, because criminal responsibility under English law begins at 10. According to Frances Crook, the director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, that is one of the lowest in Europe.

"Other European countries have set the age at 14, 15, 16 or, in some cases, at 18," Crook told The Guardian newspaper.

"If children do something wrong, they should be dealt with through the care system not the criminal justice system. Children know if they have done something wrong, but they don't know the difference between various levels of wrongdoing."

Former head of Merseyside's Serious Crime Squad Detective Superintendent Albert Kirby, who led the Bulger investigation, disagreed. "I think there is no doubt they fully understood the magnitude of what they were doing," he told The Mirror newspaper this week.

"I have thought about it a great deal and I now accept that we were faced with two young boys who, together, were capable of committing evil in the extreme. It was clear they had formed the intention to take a child and kill him."