Today I'm angry about.....

[Bruce Rioja]

'The 16-year-old, who cannot be named'.

Eh? Not only is he named in The Mail online but they have pictures of him to boot.

Anyway, the little nice person. I hope he gets his!

[bobo the clown]

'The 16-year-old, who cannot be named'.

Eh? Not only is he named in The Mail online but they have pictures of him to boot.

Anyway, the little tw*t. I hope he gets his!

Judge gave permisdion 30 minutes after sentencing

[KeyserSoze]

the judge must have only just lifted the banning order.

Well weird reading how he acted afterwards

[Prufrock]

I've never quite understood the 'normal' mentality to cases like this, and whilst my reasoning sounds bleeding heart liberal it would often have folk locked up for longer than does happen.

The thing I've never got is that, in my head, if you carry out a pre-meditated murder then you are mentally ill almost by definition. If I had to start a brainstorm at coming up with a definition of a psychopath one of the first things up there would be 'the sort of nutter who kills people on purpose'. These aren't questions it seems to me of a flawed morality. It's not somebody understanding the rules but bending them for their own advantage or because they lost their temper. There people aren't wired up right to understand it in the first place. There was a case a few years ago of a lad who killed two people because he thought he was in a video game!

This lad apparently went back to his seat, said 'good times' and acted like nothing had happened. He's tapped! Don't send him to prison; send him to a psychiatric unit. When/IF he's cured then let him out but you need to be properly sure. In cases like this it wouldn't surprise me for there to never be a point at which he'd be safe to let out.

The guy who thought he was in a video game is out now. It'd be interesting to know how those sort of assessments about whether people were safe to release were made, and what the re-offending rate is.

[William the White]

These tragic events look like the work of someone suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

He needs an urgent diagnosis and appropriate treatment. I doubt that prison is appropriate.

I note a psychiatrist gave evidence, but I've not seen any detail.

[KeyserSoze]

These tragic events look like the work of someone suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

He needs an urgent diagnosis and appropriate treatment. I doubt that prison is appropriate.

I note a psychiatrist gave evidence, but I've not seen any detail.

Some choice quotes here, though not the whole testimony i assume

http://news.sky.com/story/1366062/ann-m ... ll-cornick" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[LeverEnd]

I don't share your humanitarian response. It's like saying that the worse your crime, the less you should be blamed for it. What he's done is sickening and he deserves to suffer for it. sadly he never will anywhere near enough. I don't believe in treatment and rehabilitation for crimes like this.
I look at her family and his reaction to his crime, and my feeling of sympathy for them are matched in strength by the hope that, as Bruce says, he gets his at some point.

[Bruce Rioja]

Oh - are we headed towards this 'evil people don't really exist' bullshit again?

[Hoboh]

£300,000 PA to keep nutters in Broadmoor, currently spending £60,000,000 on them!
I know where I'd rather the money go and I suspect many others can think of better causes instead of lost causes.

[Hoboh]

Last Wednesday, the DWP continued to battle the information commissioner and hostile judgments in the courts, ordering it to reveal where possibly hundreds of thousands of people are being sent to work without pay for weeks and months at a time.

At a tribunal on Wednesday, the DWP argued that if the public knew exactly where people were being sent on placements political protests would increase, which was likely to lead to the collapse of several employment schemes and undermine the government’s economic interests.

The DWP confirmed some of the UK’s biggest charities, including the British Heart Foundation, Scope, Banardo’s, Sue Ryder, and Marie Curie had withdrawn from the CWP scheme, causing a significant loss of placements.

Giving evidence, senior civil servant Jennifer Bradley confirmed that numerous charities and businesses were receiving cash payments as an incentive to take on the unemployed.

She said several DWP schemes used mandatory unpaid work as a tool to help people but stressed that it was written into the terms that charities and businesses could not use people out of work to replace their paid workforce.

The DWP said it could not comment on individual cases but added that community work placements “help long-term unemployed people to gain work experience which increases their confidence, helps them to gain vital skills and crucially, improves their chances of getting a job.

“We are not naming the charities and community groups involved in the scheme in order to protect them from those who seem intent on stopping us helping people into work.”

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014 ... ent-labour" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Fcuking disgusting!

[Harry Genshaw]

These tragic events look like the work of someone suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

He needs an urgent diagnosis and appropriate treatment. I doubt that prison is appropriate.

I note a psychiatrist gave evidence, but I've not seen any detail.

Sounds like he was planning it for some time too. I wonder if any concerns for his mental health had been raised previously. Can't imagine how his parents must be feeling

[Prufrock]

Oh - are we headed towards this 'evil people don't really exist' bullshit again?

Well, from the news reports it seems like he had a perfectly normal upbringing so there can't be the usual 'inherent underclass' angle. So you're alternatives seem to be:

a) possessed by an evil spirit.
b) re-incarnation of Lucifer.
c) some other form of unexplained inherent 'badness'
d) seriously mentally unstable.

I know where my money is. I'm not talking about having sympathy for him, rather there's no way the good old Victorian "shove 'em in jail that'll learn 'em" approach is going to work.

[bobo the clown]

↑↑ you've forgotten "absolute c^nt".

[thebish]

I'm not sure that people seem that interested in "learning" him, though - I think they are interested merely in punishing him...

[jaffka]

or being protected from him by him being locked away so he cannot harm anyone else

[Prufrock]

↑↑ you've forgotten "absolute c^nt".

Where does that come from though? It's all well and good saying he's a wrong 'un, lock him up, but that's not normal behaviour, that's not even on the scale. You either sign up to some sort of Manichean viewpoint and he's just inherently bad/evil/whatever in which case lock him up job's a good 'un wait for the next one to happen and do the same, or you try to understand what's gone on to make a seemingly normal kid do something incomprehensibly awful.

If I read about someone nicking something, or even killing someone for an obvious motive, I can relate in some way to what they're doing and thinking and see the moral choice they failed on. With something like this I can't begin to get my head around it. He brought whisky in to celebrate. That's a sick detail, but also shows a complete inability to register consequences in that he thought there'd be a point at which he was going to get to drink that. That mentality is terrifying.

I'd just rather that instead of having a moralistic huff about it all for a week then forgetting about it they spent time trying to figure out why it happened so they might be able to stop it in the future.

[Hoboh]

↑↑ you've forgotten "absolute c^nt".

Where does that come from though? It's all well and good saying he's a wrong 'un, lock him up, but that's not normal behaviour, that's not even on the scale. You either sign up to some sort of Manichean viewpoint and he's just inherently bad/evil/whatever in which case lock him up job's a good 'un wait for the next one to happen and do the same, or you try to understand what's gone on to make a seemingly normal kid do something incomprehensibly awful.

If I read about someone nicking something, or even killing someone for an obvious motive, I can relate in some way to what they're doing and thinking and see the moral choice they failed on. With something like this I can't begin to get my head around it. He brought whisky in to celebrate. That's a sick detail, but also shows a complete inability to register consequences in that he thought there'd be a point at which he was going to get to drink that. That mentality is terrifying.

I'd just rather that instead of having a moralistic huff about it all for a week then forgetting about it they spent time trying to figure out why it happened so they might be able to stop it in the future.

What kind of like, well we learned how to spot mental health issues, so any baby that raises its left arm first gets shot?

[Prufrock]

Yes. Exactly that.

[Hoboh]

Yes. Exactly that.

Animal!

[William the White]

I think this is a really complex case and, in this country, unique.

This is a good kid (his teachers' reports call him a a lovely student, a good, well-behaved student).

He is an above average student at this school in terms of ability. He is described by one friend as 'the most intelligent' he has ever known.

He posts his intentions on facebook last Christmas eve.

He comes to school and shows his fellow students the knives he is going to use.

[I speculate - he is asking to be caught, to be stopped, he feels he can't stop himself so is asking for others to help him]...

He tells the police he is glad he is caught. he tells them he wants to go to prison. [he knows he is a bad person. he knows he deserves punishment]

He displays no empathy with the people he has hurt, he is totally, totally wrapped up in himself...

His psychiatrist in court says he has psychopathic tendencies...

This young person is very seriously disturbed. He doesn't belong in prison. He doesn't belong on the gallows.

He belongs in a psychiatric unit for seriously disturbed young offenders... it's a pity the Blair government closed one of those... maybe both...