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Are there some crimes — some individuals — so terrible that the process of law cannot be trusted to deal with them?
That's the implication behind calls for Jon Venables to have his anonymity overthrown and the details of his new offences — he faces child porn charges, it's reported — made public.
There continues to be a view that strong feeling argues its own right: that Denise Fergus has a “right to know” about an alleged crime unconnected to the death of her son James Bulger. It is not an insult to Denise Fergus's grief to say that no such right exists.
It is precisely when the crimes are terrible that you most need the law. If anyone harmed my daughter, I would want them tortured to death — which is why I'm the last person who should sit on that jury.
And public anger here is directed at a chimera: an idea of evil. It's no more than a commonplace to say that the Bulger killers became a repository for our darkest anxieties about childhood. The Venables and Robert Thompson of public imagination have eclipsed their flesh-and-blood originals.
In the mind's eye, James Bulger is preserved at the age he was when he died. But something strange happened, too, to his killers. The idea of Venables and Thompson as grown men isn't quite available to our imaginations. The only images we have are photographs of children: we half-see them, still, as the children they were. That has seemingly made it easier, rather than harder, to hate them, as if their adult selves can adopt — in a way that a child cannot — responsibility for their crime.
What would it be like to live as Venables and Thompson live? “Haunted” is too weak a word. They live in fear of being killed. Their names, their daily habits, even the voices in which they speak are determined by the effort to be someone other than they were.
It's reported that Thompson had to leave a job, because his mother visited him and spoke in a Scouse accent. Venables, apparently, has suffered a psychological breakdown, serially confessing his true identity, and is now in a hospital wing.
They are not just carrying the damage they would both have carried even had they not killed. They are carrying something irrevocable, and — here's the term I hesitate to use because it's the whole core of the argument — unforgivable.
But the theory of justice under which they were released says that even so horrible a crime as theirs is forgivable: or, at least, that it belongs to the children they were.
It is inconceivable the adult Venables could live day-to-day without forgetting, or even forgiving, for moments or hours at a time, what his 10-year-old self did. But our theory of justice — the one that doesn't kill 10-year-old boys or incarcerates them for life — says that is not only to be tolerated, it is to be wished for.
That's hard to stomach. But if you don't believe in the universal and dispassionate application of the law, you have to ask yourself: what do you believe in?
Matt Damon and the talented Mr Clooney
Interviewed at the weekend, film star Matt Damon was rather melancholy. When the interviewer pointed out that his films outgross George Clooney's, he replied that he's paid much less.
“I'm sure they have very accurate metrics on how to compensate people for what they're actually worth in Hollywood,” he said, “and I'm not the big-pay-cheque guy, so clearly they know what the reality is.”
Most of the roles he gets, he said glumly, are ones Brad Pitt has already turned down.
Rather depressing for the rest of us: get to Matt Damon levels of fame, money and success, and you'll still be looking morosely at the next guy along. It's put me right off becoming a Hollywood heart-throb.
Bog standard outrage at Mark Oaten
No sight stirs the heart quicker to pity than a Liberal Democrat at bay. Mark Oaten MP spent a week living on a council estate for a TV stunt, and is now accused of “hypocrisy” for accepting a £4,000 appearance fee.
I'm rather on his side: he took his fee from a telly company that profited from making him look ridiculous, not from the OAPs' Christmas Fund.
His fellow participants, Tory MPs Nadine Dorries and Tim Loughton, either declined or failed to negotiate a fee and now make blue-nosed affectations of outrage.
Mr Loughton said: “The cheek of it! It cost me money to do the programme. Every flat I stayed in had a dodgy loo seat, so I went to Argos and bought everybody one out of my own pocket.”
He adds, preeningly: “They weren't just any bog-standard loo seats.” Words imminently failing us, we must move on.
Hacking back the tree of knowledge
Lord Mandelson dismisses protest over the £1 billion cut in the higher-education budget by saying lecturers “think they have a right to be set in aspic”.
The image of a pork pie is an agreeable one, but a distraction. Of course academics don't have an automatic right to jobs but profitability is a poor gauge of their value.
“Making targeted savings in areas that have the largest gap between income and spending”, however, is how Sussex explains plans to shed 115 jobs. If you're pruning the great shrub of the knowledge economy, you need to be sure you're going for the leaves rather than the roots.
Reader views (10)
When will our government understand that we don’t care about these offenders keeping their lives anonymous? Why the hell should we?
What about the rights of the people that are murdered or raped or tortured?
What happened to their rights?
If the government are so concerned for the safety of these monsters, keep them locked away from normal law abiding decent people.
Or do we count for nothing?
- Candy Lee Williams, Southend-on-Sea Essex, UK, 09/03/2010 09:52
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Sam, I've been meaning for some time to thank you for injecting intelligence into the Standard. Today's piece on Jon Venables made me realise quite how important that is. Not many media outlets for thoughtfulness, it seems.
- Oliver, London, 08/03/2010 23:10
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"But if you don't believe in the universal and dispassionate application of the law, you have to ask yourself: what do you believe in?"
Where is the application of law here?. How is it that two individuals who cruelly, and with premediated malice, murdered a toddler, did not get the punishment that they deserved. 10 years worth of education & accomodation significantly better than they would have had in the outside world if the stories are to be believed is no real punishment for the crime they committed, and on release to be protected by the State against all comers. Indeed the worse the crime the better the level of protection received from the State in modern Britain.
I don't think anyone is looking for them to be hanged or tortured to death but if they had only spent a requisite time in prison, the Bulger family and society in general may have found it more acceptable.
Its funny, in 12 paragraphs, the victim's family is mentioned only once. What help have they had from the state to come to terms with THEIR situation?
For goodness sake, it's time to look after the victims and properly punish the perpetrators and not the other way round.
Sam, would you be happy for either or both of these two to babysit young children in your family? If not, then don't tell the rest of society to turn the other cheek
- Brianc, London, 08/03/2010 16:29
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"And public anger here is directed at a chimera:"
No, no it's not; It is very much aimed at a pathetic, failed judicial system.
Our judicial system has been diluted and tampered with particularly because of the 'uman Rights Act. Alien European Law crashing headlong into Common English Law based on hundreds of years of common sense, not pie in the sky idealism.
We used to be a nation of pragmatists, not anymore however. If there has been one particular aspect of our society that the Liberal-Lefties have affected more dangerously than any other it is our judicial system.
The bail system, parole system, early release schemes, etc. have caused havoc for families who have become the victims of them.
Labour: "Tough for the victims of crime".
- Frank, Home Counties, England., 08/03/2010 15:36
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Until you yourself has gone through the horror of a family member being murdered, you have no right to say what is forgiveable. I believed in the liberal, fair and just legal system before it happened to our family. Now all I believe in is the death penalty. Good to think that every day they are haunted with what they have done, but you know I doubt it very much. These people are immune to other people's suffering or else why would they do it? As shown no amount of rehabilitation changes them ultimately. We need a radical change of thought on dealing with evil people, less looking after them and more protecting everyone else by keeping them locked up.
- Audrey, Essex, 08/03/2010 14:59
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>>The law must protect the likes of Jon Venables too
Agreed. But not more than it protects the ordinary man in the street.
- Adam, Adam, Harrow, 08/03/2010 14:26
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Sam asks "Are there some crimes — some individuals — so terrible that the process of law cannot be trusted to deal with them?" Well, in my opinion, the answer to this is yes. I believe those two boys knew what they were doing then and Venables knows what he is doing now. Those boys should have been locked up for life and by this I mean life. I am afraid the bleeding-heart do-gooders are truly responsible for making this country what it is now - one where there is no respect for others or the law and no fear of any conseqences. My sympathies are entirely with James's mother.
- Shirley, Bromley, 08/03/2010 13:30
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Thanks Sam, a voice of reason in a sea of ill-judged hysteria.
- Ruth, Hampton, 08/03/2010 11:58
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What is this daily tabloid hysteria over this issue supposed to achieve? This type of unthinkable freakish crime happens thankfully once in a generation and I have not seen any evidence of how their witch hunt against Venables will anyway save any children’s lives.
If these papers are so concerned about child safety investigate whether lighter evenings by switching to CET or introducing a compulsory 20 mph peed limit in urban areas could save 100s of lives as TV and radio does.
- Ian, London, 08/03/2010 11:48
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Pleased to see some sensible reportage on the Venables case at last.
- G, United Kingdom, 08/03/2010 11:21
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