Source I'm not trying to condone what Venables & Thompson did, but to kill at 10 years old suggests you are a product of your environment rather than a raging psychopath. They should have been banged up until we could be reasonably confident that they could be released without risk to the public. Normally it wouldn't be a big deal, but the red-tops have had the masses in a feeding frenzy throughout. So when we did release them, the knives were out. The red-tops would pay well for a sighting, and Denise Bulger has already admitted stalking them. Now one of them has allegedly breached parole... Perhaps this should have been reported in the news, but whereas in normal situations the authorities wouldn't release any details, in this case, many people (including the Home Secretary) want to know where/when/why and how. Clearly this information would make it much easier to track him down... What happened to wiping the slate clean? How long before we have a lynching? Leave the guys alone - and allow the legal system to deal with them properly and effectively.
The legal sytem does not work, its full of magic sh*t, and to believe the new "kill with a knife" means 25 year!!! Sorry but it means Jack s**t, kill with a hammer and get less??? As for this Bulger killer, well in my eyes it must have been obvious he would return to jail, i mean spending his childhood in prison would turn out to be his life is an understatement, so to expect he would lead a normal life on release is insane Im all for punishing killers of any description, but we have to be certain when to release them and that it is the RIGHT desicion
Rumours are that he got stopped entering Liverpool, and once they found out who he was he got arrested.
Then sent a 10 year old to prison for life!? What the ****! I was only 8 when all this would have happened, im just amazed at how any judge can not offer rehabilitation, a few years in juvenile prison or similar to a kid. Im also not surprised he's been returned to prison. Hes grown up in there, the system has made that his home and now they have to live with the consequences.
Uh, you do know what Venables and Thompson did to get banged up, right? Without putting this too bluntly, they abducted a two-year-old child, beat him with an iron bar so severely that; To top this off, they left him weighted down on train tracks where he was cut in half by a train. Serious enough for you? Do you really think "a few years in juvenile prison" to be a commensurate sentence for that crime? A few years in juvie is what you get for a serious course of shoplifting and casual bullying in this country. Rehabilitation was one of the main reasons they were sent to prison, as programmes designed to rehabilitate are a standard (though admittedly not very effective) part of the British penal system. Additionally, they didn't get 'life,' they were sentenced to be detained At Her Majesty's Pleasure, with a recommendation that they serve a minimum of 8 years. That was (illegally, it was later ruled) increased to 15 years by the Home Secretary of the time after considerable public pressure, and having been reduced to 10 years they've now gotten 2 years off for good behaviour and remorse. Total incarceration: 8 years; less than half of the minimum 'life sentence.' Face facts; product of their environment or not, the legal system serves a greater purpose than just rehabilitation. For sure, these kids would have grown up more normally if never punished and merely moved elsewhere, given new identities, and supervised. Unfortunately for them, there is more to the UK's response to crime; fortunately for them, they got off pretty lightly considering they were found guilty of abduction, false imprisonment, torture, murder, and mutilation of a corpse. I think they should've been locked up until they were safe to be released; if that's now, it's now.
I do not think that they would have grown up anything remotely classed as 'normal' if they had not been punished in some way. Let's check out how they started: When he was five, Robert Thompson's drunken father, who habitually beat and sexually abused his wife and children, abandoned the family. The following week their home burned down. His mother was an alcoholic with a history of suicide attempts, and out of control of her seven aggressive, violent sons who bit, hammered, battered, tortured, and threatened to knife each other. When one of the boys was returned home from foster care he attempted suicide by overdose. Robert was the youngest of the clan and thus least able to defend himself. Jon Venables was an emotionally immature, hyperactive child who fought at school. After his parents separated, he spent two days a week at his father's house nearby. He became a loner with attention-seeking tendencies; he banged his head on walls and cut himself with scissors at school. He received no help for these behaviours. His mother suffered from a range of psychiatric problems including severe depression. His brother and sister attended a special needs school for major learning disabilities. They were both tried in adult court. Significantly, the court would not allow testimony or evidence detailing their dysfunctional young lives. As such the defendants did not present a defense. The judge called their murder an act of "unparalleled evil and barbarity" and sentenced to an institution for young offenders. Judging from their mental breakdowns in juvenile detention I think that the horrendousness of their act did sink in and that some form of repentance was psychologically needed. For months both were on suicide watch; Robert in particular suffered the delusion that Jamie was "growing inside him" and that eventually, through giving birth he would bring him back to life. Another example of a ten-year old murderer can be found in Mary Bell (yes, girls get to kill too), who killed a four- and three-year old when she was 11. Bell's mother was a prostitute who was often absent from the family home. Mary was her first child, born when she was 17 years old. It is not known who Mary's biological father was; for most of her life she believed it to be a habitual criminal later arrested for armed robbery who had married her mother some time after she was born. Independent accounts from family members suggest strongly that Betty had attempted to kill Mary and make her death look like an accident more than once during the first few years of her life. Mary herself stated that she was subject to repeated sexual abuse, her mother forcing her from the age of four to engage in sex acts with men. Are we seeing a pattern yet? I think that, with exception of the way the trial of Venables and Thompson was conducted, the legal system dealt with the difficult situation reasonably well. What the above indicates is that in order to prevent these crimes in future, and treat (potential) offenders effectively we must consider where these murdering children come from; what sort of childhood raises potential killers. The political view, of course, was different: "society needs to condemn a little more, and understand a little less" --John Major Public outcry is just hypocricy, as always. In Birmingham alone eight children died over the last three years at the hands of their grotesquely abusive parents and people barely give a ****. It certainly doesn't seem to warrant more attention from the tabloids than one front page outcry, if that; I doubt that those cases will be remembered even one year on. So why should we expect 10-year olds to behave to a higher standard than supposedly responsible adult parents that abuse, neglect and kill them? The Bulger murder reaps so much outrage because it shows up how we raise our kids; how we allow them to be raised in this society. It shows the depressing truth that nothing has changed since the days of Mary Bell. It is the British people who stand accused, and they know it. Their indignant outrage is just distraction from the painful truth.
That has got to be a real possibility. Surly to be put through such abuse so young, and then to live with having done such horrible crimes. Surly they must be so messed up as never to be able to live a normal life?
yeah agree with nexxo here too.. at that age they can still be saved.. it's when they hit 20+ and still acting like a fool, time to bring down the reality check.. heck even at 17 you should be on the right path it really goes back to teachers identifying these kids early on too.. even parents, if you see a friend of your child and something is just not right- don't be afraid to say something!
They're /10 years old/. Emotionally immature and a product of parents who have shown them no better (and whilst im loathe to say, growing up in an era where violence can be seen on tv and computers any time of the day- not to say this sparked anything but I would imagine it could be a contribution). If you ask any 12 or 13 year old their idea of justice you would see how immature their views can be. In this case a horrific crime took place, but they had been brought up to know nothing but pain, fear and self-loathing. Justice needs to be done, but locking a 10 year old up for life in jail is literally handing them a life of crime. They get to 10 knowing nothing but crime, they get sent to jail where they socialise with criminals, then they come out and have missed an entire education and have an entire country breathing down their neck just waiting for them to "do something". "Life" when sentencing I am lead to believe means 26 years? This is life in the truest sense.
My point was that detention is supposed to be about rehabilitation, not just punishment. If they have been rehabilitated sufficiently that they are deemed safe for release, then we must accept that. Naturally, there needs to be conditions applied, and if they are broken, then action needs to be taken. But it is none our business, what happened and what will happened next. I forgive the red-tops - they are just trying to shift newspapers. It's the people who buy them and revel in their righteous indignation. ...like this. For those with a religious leanings, there is Luke 15:7: Wouldn't it be cool that rather than being continually hounded (or in Prison) for the rest of their lives, that these guys had productive careers in the voluntary sector or in the NHS. OK, that might be a bit optimistic given the last 20 years of their lives, but must we enjoy their continued downfall quite so much?
As usual Nexxo appears to get it right (in my opinion). I do agree that they are clearly products of their upbringing, however their rehabilitation, if any, would have been lacklustre considering what they actually did. The men, as they are just a bit younger then me know, should be left alone to actually try and make something of their lives. Forgive, not my place to say. Forget, definately not. But let them at least try to live their lives.
Kids screw up. Messed up kids screw up badly. Are we blaming their parents yet? Nope, don't see anyone mentioning them. How about a government that likes to spend more on waging illegal wars than schools or social services? Or a society that can live with a third of all children living below the poverty line? What, despite "society's" frequent attempts over the last decade to find them and demand their lynching? Say it ain't so? Oh we just do what abusive parents do: taking their own frustrations and inadequacies out on the kids.
While I agree with a lot of what Nexxo has said, I think most of us even at the age of 10 have a fairly strong idea of what's right & wrong - the media itself is a fairly prevalent and unavoidable presence in this regard. But that aside, our sense of right & wrong is formed earlier than that, & if these 2 did not yet understand the nature of what they had done it's difficult to simply says "shoot them". In effect, they were still infants themselves, still primary school age, they knew they were doing wrong but were unable to appreciate the scale of their crime. Nobody that age can break out of their conditioning. While I could neither forgive nor forget a murder (horrific as this one was), it's not as clear cut as those commited by adults. It's a lot easier as a passive observer to have a strong but impotent opinion, I'm glad I was not the judge, not on the jury, not in a position where I have to decide their fate. In my utopia, those 2 kids parents would have been punished too though.
Its the parent that need to have been punished. Im all for taking responsibility for ones self, and I think this even into the teens- however at ten years old you should be under safe parental control and what you do when you arent is the responsibility of those who are guardian over you. These kids did wrong in near certainty as a result of how they were brought up, and on top of that were unsupervised and allowed to commit this horrific act (ooi how did they get a baby?). Its more the parents fault who over years of living should be been gaining the wisdom to raise a child properly than the children who, despite maybe having an understanding of right and wrong, due to their upbringing couldn't formulate it correctly to stop themselves in their tracks and actually question what they were doing.
Totally, nonetheless those two are not absolved, they took a life. I've always wondered how the wee lad James was out of supervision for long enough too mind. Not the same issue, but it's a factor. In shopping centres my wee lad gets no more than about 3metres from me.
I am not saying that they should be absolved. That is black-and-white thinking. Yes, they needed to be punished because they needed to learn that what they did was wronger than a very wrong thing indeed. But in the end, they were acting on their childhood experience. Blame their parents. And then blame their parents...
That is true, my mum wouldn't have even let me walk around a city centre by myself aged 10. It was only when I was at high school that she would have let me. I agree with cmj -It would be much better to see them turn their lives around and be doing something worth while. I remember meeting up with an old friend, whose dad had been in and out of prison and on heroin etc, and I was so pleased for him when I heard that his dad had changed his life around and now helps addicts and ex offenders.
yeah drugs usually end up badly.. I've known a few guys went in on drug charges and they came out holy rollers.. one of my old friends, much as I tried I couldn't help break his habits was in and out, dunno where he is today.. but others came out- without the weed they were paranoid as hell and talked about god alot and how they were saved in county jail.. I don't think they should have gone in the first place- but they slip up with that daily habit, one snitch and your in it's that lifestyle back in the 90's.. with kids nowdays, the girls are getting dumber and dumber- having sex at really early age.. my sister is having a really hard time with her teens right now- she has 4 girls and two are having sex- if you know my sister, those kids have two of the best parents ever.. she's going through a lot right now but they can't lock them up forever.. kids always find a way to do what they're going to do- and think they love these guys (I know idiots heheh) kids at 10 really can be saved though imo.. parents not watching their own kid is another issue- but really, you can't blame them for this, what happened is pretty bad
