Teenage murderer should have been wearing an electronic tag

A breakdown in communications between magistrates' court officials and a tagging company left Kieran Wright, 17, without a tag at the time of the killing, police said.

During the period when he should have been tagged, Wright attended a late-night party at a caravan site in Lancing, West Sussex, and murdered Michael Morgan in an apparently motiveless attack.

Wright was sentenced at Lewes Crown Court last week after pleading guilty to murder.

He was ordered to serve a minimum of 12 years before becoming eligible for parole after he told police in interview that Michael was "in the wrong place at the wrong time".

Wright, who has previous convictions for assault, used two kitchen knives and a table leg studded with a screw to inflict 30 separate injuries to Michael's head and neck on July 1.

A couple of days earlier, Wright had his tag removed for a previous offence because that issue had expired.

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The company which fits the tag, Group 4 Securicor (G4S) said it could not be immediately replaced because officials at Worthing Magistrates' Court sent through a notice to tag him with the wrong date.

Michael's mother, Helen Long, 35, from Shoreham, near Brighton, today blamed the mix-up directly for her son's death and said she would be seeking to take legal action.

She said: "If Kieran had been tagged then my son would be alive today, it's as simple as that.

"Someone has made a massive error here and I'm going to pursue this legally. I can't explain how I feel. We thought we had got over the worst of it, then we get hit with this news.

"It is beyond belief and I feel extremely let down that when he should have been tagged and under a curfew, he was roaming the streets and able to kill my son."

A spokesman for G4S said it was looking to develop a "much closer dialogue" with the courts service to prevent a repeat.

He said: "What has essentially happened here is that Kieran was meant to be on a tag but the court issued the wrong documentation to G4S.

"G4S cannot just go ahead and tag someone without the proper documentation otherwise it would be in breach of its contract with the Ministry of Justice.

"Essentially, in the meantime, while the court and G4S were working together to get the right documents, the murder was carried out."

Wright, of Adelaide Square, Shoreham, at first denied murdering Michael, insisting he had returned home and gone to bed after the party.

But his account of events changed several times as further police evidence linking him to the crime was disclosed to him, including the discovery of his foot and palm print stained in Michael's blood.

The motive for the murder is unclear, with no evidence of a dispute between the pair and no suggestion that the killing came from any sense of revenge.

Detective Inspector Jeff Riley, of Sussex Police's major crime branch, said today: "Wright should have been wearing a tag but there was some kind of breakdown in communications between the court and the tagging company.

"We don't know who is to blame. All we know is he should have been tagged and wasn't."