Stooo wrote:Raggamuffin wrote:Stooo wrote:[quote="guest"
I think that they both should have been kept anonymous from the start, seriously, what was the point in naming them?
I agree. I don't know why the judge named them, but a fortune has been spent on protecting them.
Because of exactly that.
Didn't he get into trouble for doing that with the judges' professional governance body? (or whatever it's called in England. I'm sure I read something about it in the papers.[/quote]
I can't find anything about that tbh. I think it was a mistake, but I guess he was entitled to lift reporting restrictions. That only applied to their identity though didn't it? I don't think anyone was allowed to say where they were or whatever. He said he allowed them to be named in the public interest, but I really don't see what good it did, or why the general public needed to know who they were.[/quote]
Ah, maybe I was confusing it with a different case.
No, I can't see where the public interest in naming them lies, either, though i can think of a couple of possible reasons why he did.
1. He allowed his own personal feelings of revulsion to outweigh the greater interests of the law - understandable perhaps but highly unprofessional.
2. He wanted to set an example to others - unlikely to be effective though because any other 10 year-olds probably wouldn't understand the concept.
3. Political pressure from the Home Office. Wasn't this around the time of the Tories' Tough on Crime and Back to Basics campaigns? I can see the Govt. being perfectly capable of doing something like that.
To keep it all in one post, I'm not sure that putting Thompson&Venables in an adult prison once they turned 18 is a good idea. I'm not really a fan of charging and sentencing children in the same way as an adult once they reach the age of majority. You end up with the prospect of executing people for crimes they committed as a child, when such penalties were not applicable - I believe this has happened in the US, and it's not a road I want to go down.
There's also the risk that in an adult prison their identities would have become known and they would have become targets for vengeance attacks by other inmates.
I think it would have been a good idea to have placed them in some sort of halfway house type situation, perhaps like an open prison, where they could be monitored and gradually re-introduced to society - Venables doesn't seem to have developed the ability to cope with his "freedom".
It is a very complex matter, I don't see any easy solutions one way or the other. As it stands, Thompson's rehabilitation has been successful, Venables' hasn't. I suppose it depends on whether or not you believe a 50% success rate is worth all the effort expended.