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...October 2008 after battling a rare and aggressive form of cancer, used his $3,000 from Make-A-Wish to buy electronics and games to help other kids deal with the boredom and loneliness of hospital stays. After realizing the success of his charity, the then-16 year old created the Mikey’s Way Foundation, a non-profit that organizes a similar initiative for hospitals in New York, Connecticut, and Boston...
Murder is a shocking crime in the most typical of cases. But when a child kills another child, all sense of morality seems to be distorted, and no reaction is unequivocally justified. At the age of 10 years old, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson were each sentenced to eight years in prison for their gruesome murder of two-year-old James Bulger. Now, nine years since his release, Venables is back in custody, and the public demands to know the reason. The questions that surface query the criminal’s right to anonymity as well as appropriate prison sentences...
...Venables, together with Thompson, committed a horrific and motiveless crime when they coaxed a two-year-old away from his mother and ultimately murdered the boy alongside railway tracks. After the trial, the judge ruled that the criminals’ identities should be revealed, and so their names and hauntingly vulnerable mug shots were splashed across every newspaper. Ever since then, considerable work has gone into hiding the identity of Thompson and Venables; upon prison release, they were given new identities, and laws banned anyone from revealing their true names. However, last month it was revealed that Jon Venables...
...example by video evidence of Venables sobbing inconsolably for hours on end, can also create sympathy for excessive lenience. Despite such strong and opposing beliefs founded upon Venables’s and Thompson’s young ages, the legal age for criminal responsibility in England is 10 years old, and psychiatrists ruled that both the children could distinguish between right and wrong. In spite of general cries for vengeance and dismay over the seemingly lenient eight-year sentence, many murderers do not in fact serve much longer, and life sentence is far from the ubiquitous punishment. Although...
...this end, the extreme emotions that surround child criminals should not be allowed to impact legal proceedings further. The vengeful desires to know Venables’s crime and identity are unjustified; whether better or worse, the post-adolescent Venables is not the same 10-year-old who was tried 17 years ago. We may have had a right to know Venables’s crime then, but the public no longer has the right to know the details of the rest of his life. Venables’s identity is veiled in order to protect his life, and there...