Edlington, the age of criminal responsibility and youth sentencing

The horrific and disturbing case of the attack on two boys in Edlington, Doncaster by two brothers aged 10 and 11 at the time is one your students will be familiar with, and one which contains a couple of interesting legal issues. One of these that is certain to exercise your students is the age of criminal responsibility. As the BBC note, since the requirement to prove “mischevious discretion” in these cases for defendants aged 10 to 14 was removed by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, the age of criminal responsibility in the UK has effectively been 10 - one of the lowest in Europe. In fact, in many other European jurisdictions the two would have been thought two young to be held criminally responsible. So, is a criminal trial the best way to deal with this? Certainly one of the psychologists in the case, Dr Eileen Vizard, thinks “scientific evidence about child development indicates 10-year-olds are not capable of participating fully or fairly in a criminal trial”.

This case is also valuable material for a consideration of the aims of punishment - what should the courts be trying to achieve here? Should the sentence be longer, as these campaigners wish, or is a criminal sentence actually the wrong way for us as a country to go about things?

The case is also an excellent example of the (often misreported) indeterminate sentence