'Jon Venables and Robert Thompson should not have been punished as harshly as adults for killing James Bulger', argues legal professor
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Twenty-five years ago, in a celebrated and stomach-churning British case, two strangers abducted two-year old James Bulger.
They tortured him — beating him, throwing paint in his eye and stuffing his mouth with batteries — before crushing his skull.
To hide their crime, they arranged for James’ body to be mutilated by a train. And they knew what they were doing.
They did not believe, as sometimes happens to those in the grip of psychotic delusions, that James was sent from outer space to destroy the world, or that he was in need of liberation from demonic possession.
No, they did it for fun.
(Image: PA)
The perpetrators — Robert Thompson and Jon Venables — were also both ten years old at the time.
A case like Bulger’s scrambles the usual principles of criminal law.
When a person of sound mind, in touch with reality and aware of the pertinent facts, does something truly awful to somebody else for fun, there is no room for excuse or mitigation.
Those are the people for whom criminal punishment is devised.
But criminal punishment is not devised for ten year old children.
While some sort of very severe punishment of Thompson and Venables seems essential, it also seems wrong to treat them in the same way as we would if they had been 19 or 30 when they murdered James Bulger. Some kind of leniency seems warranted.
Their very young age gives us pause. But why should children who do terrible things be treated more leniently than adults? There is no doubt they should be. But why?
We should resist the temptation to insist there is something in the psychology of every individual child criminal that distinguishes him from an adult.
Maybe James’ killers did not know what they were doing to him, or what the impact would be on those who loved him? Or maybe they did not understand that theirs was a grave crime? Maybe they did not even understand what a crime is?
But except for their ages, there is no reason whatsoever to think any of this is true.
There is no reason, except their ages, for thinking Thompson and Venables were psychologically different from adults in ways that warrant excuse.
Research in child psychology, not to mention ordinary experience, does show that there are important psychological differences between average children at particular ages and average adults. Minds change over time.
But Thompson and Venables were not average. Ordinarily it takes years of abuse for evil to fester to the point of enabling behavior like Thompson and Venables’.
(Image: PA)
(Image: Getty)
If they were precocious in their depravity, why deny they were precocious, also, in the psychological capacities thanks to which adults are worthy of full helpings of punishment?
What Thompson and Venables did is not just extremely unusual for a child, it is also extremely unusual for an adult.
When we see behavior like that in an adult we conclude that we have found someone different from normal in ways that warrant punishment. Why not reach the same conclusion about children?
There is, however, one important feature of Thompson and Venables that made them different from any adult — even adults capable of atrocities like theirs. Thompson and Venables were not allowed to vote.
To see why that matters, ask yourself what is wrong with vigilantes.
Why is it wrong for you, an ordinary citizen, to bring justice down on an adult criminal?
(Image: Getty Images)
The reason it’s wrong is that it’s not your job to punish people. It’s the government’s job.
But if the criminal deserves punishment, who cares who gives it to him, a vigilante mob or the government?
The reason to care is that it is the criminal’s government, but it is not the criminal’s mob.
He has a role to play in the government’s behaviour that he does not have in the mob's behaviour. He has a say over what the government does. He has the vote.
So when the government punishes him, he brings it on himself in a way that he does not when the mob punishes him. In a democracy, we have to hesitate to give full punishment to anyone who does not have a say over what the government does.
If they do not have a say, then the line between government punishment and mob punishment becomes very thin.
James Bulger was no less of a victim, no less wronged than the victims of adult criminals.
We should stop pretending that child criminals, all of them, are less mature than adult criminals. Some are precocious, and plenty of adults who commit crimes are very immature.
But we should also hold back from punishing children as harshly as we punish adults.
They are a disenfranchised class, denied as robust a role as adults in guiding our government.
Professor Gideon Yaffe, from Yale Law School, is author of the forthcoming book The Age of Culpability: Children and the Nature of Criminal Responsibility