Jon Venables, Media Circus, Redemption and media

AKA “Post with title I couldn’t decide on”

If you live in the UK, you have probably seen the media circus around the Jon Venables arrest. Circus is certainly the right word, there are no shortage of clowns that’s for sure.

Others have spoken about this case and largely said everything I wanted to say. Ann Somerville here and the link she provides to an excellent resume in the Telegraph

Their posts largely make most of what I have to say redundant – but being me that doesn’t stop me saying it anyway.

First of all, the media seriously needs to shut the hell up on this one. What the public is interested in is not the same as the public interest – and it certainly isn’t in the public interest to have every ex-con hounded by the press because people want to hear every salacious detail of their lives and crimes. That’s not public interest – that’s morbid public curiosity. This kind of ghoulish side show hurts the victims and the survivors, hounds anyone trying to rehabilitate and skews the news media to focus on stories that are shocking and horrifying over stories that are vital and important. Infotainment is usually reprehensible -infotainment that is feeding on the pain and suffering of others is sick and twisted.

They also need to stay away from Denise Bulger. Her loss and pain is catastrophic – dragging it up in front of her and for the whole nation to see years after the fact? That’s cruel. I’m sure your readers and viewers do want to see her pain paraded around again, but this is indecent. It’s obscene.

This woman has a right to hate and a right to be screaming for vengeance – but her anger, her desire for vengeance, should never be a part of our justice considerations or how we treat offenders. It boggles the mind that anyone would believe otherwise – hatred, anger and vengeance are not justice, no matter how natural those motivations are – not should they be show cased as relevant to the case – and certainly not relevant to a subsequent case years after the fact!

In fact, media leaping all over rime has to stop, it really does. Get a suitably sensationalist case happen and the media has dissected everything in the most amateurish, unjust and down right incompetent terms its possible to see. Half of all accused in these big crimes seem to have been tried, sentenced and pilloried before they even see the inside of a court room. And there’s no chance of being found not guilty – no matter what the actual legal proceedings decide. Criminals whose sentence is other have to live the rest of their lives in desperate hiding from journalists that circle like vultures. What possible use is their of this? What possible benefit to society is there in us having paparazzi circling Maxine Carr or Jon Venables? Of them constantly trying to expose them, constantly hunting them, trying to report their every move? Ironically the same papers will then turn around and bleat about the COST of keeping their identities secret! It wouldn’t cost so much if the justice system didn’t have to fight tooth and nail against the 4th estate to preserve this privacy!

You know what? I firmly believe that everyone – everyone – can change and can be redeemed, no matter how abhorrent their crimes, how depraved their actions or how repellent their history. I don’t think any human being reaches a point where there is no hope of them being more than what they are. I believe everyone has worth. I believe everyone has value. I believe there is something worth promoting, preserving and heightening in all people.

Does this make me hopelessly naive? Maybe – but then I’m a criminal lawyer. I have defended the worst kind of scum imaginable. People who have killed, who have raped, who have messed with kids, people who have made me feel unclean just sharing a room with them. I do not have rose-tinted glasses when it comes to examining my fellow man.

I do not agree with the death penalty. I do not agree with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. I do not agree with a prison system that leaves people more broken when they leave than when they come in. I do not believe in hanging criminal records around people’s necks like some kind of leper sign. I do not agree with any kind of sentence that does not include a capacity for redemption. I think it is an indictment of society that we are willing to give up on someone – anyone.

But even if you don’t see eye to eye with me on this – and many people don’t, certainly – in the case of Jon Venables there’s something that has to be added.

He was 10 years old.

10. A child. It was a travesty that he was tried as an adult. And it is beyond disgusting that we treated children as criminals. It is a national shame that we took 2 children’s vital formative years in such a cruel fashion in the name of hate and outrage and anger. It is a national shame that sacrificed children on the altar of vengeance. It is repellent that their sentences were increased because of a public peittion of vengeance obsessed people organised by the Sun. It is disgusting that media, rage and vengeance saw 2 children’s prison sentences extended. That was not justice – it wasn’t even a pretence of justice and thank gods that the House of Lords overturned that particular political pandering to public thirst for vengeance.

And it is not only bewildering, but it is horrific, to condemn a child as irredeemable. It is an act of unfathomable spite to believe a child of 10 cannot grow up to be more than he is. To believe a child of 10 is damaged beyond repair, is evil beyond salvation is inconceivable.

As a 10 year old child, Jon Venables did something evil and unspeakable. He is not that 10 year old boy any more – but we never seem willing to believe he can ever be more than that – an evil child murderer. And if we don’t believe he can ever be more than that then what chance does he ever have to BE more than that?