Britain Torn as 2 Young Killers Apply for Parole

Jon Venables and Robert Thompson were 10-year-old truants when they lured an unsuspecting toddler away from his mother in a suburban shopping mall near Liverpool, beat the boy to death and left his body on railroad tracks to be severed by a train.

The abduction was captured on a security camera, and blurred pictures of every parent’s worst nightmare were broadcast around the world. The youths who brutalized 2-year-old James Bulger joined the ranks of Britain’s most reviled criminals for the February 1993 murder.

Now 18 and legal adults, Venables and Thompson appeared before parole hearings this week to argue that they have been reformed during their years in detention and should be released. They are expected to be freed within days or weeks to embark on new lives--with new identities.

The case is so emotionally charged in Britain that a court has prohibited the nation’s media from printing photographs of Venables and Thompson that postdate the murder. Complaints were filed against three Liverpool papers last week for publishing police mug shots of the boys snapped after their arrest. A picture of Thompson taken during a supervised prison outing last summer to prepare him to reenter society is reported to be in circulation, and opponents of the teenagers’ release have threatened to put it on the Internet.

The convicts, still known to the public by their schoolboy photographs, fear attacks by vigilantes who believe they are evil psychopaths and should remain behind bars.

The parole hearings held for Venables on Monday and Thompson on Wednesday have stirred a moral debate about the desire for revenge in a country that has no death penalty versus the belief in redemption for child-killers who were children themselves at the time they committed murder.

“Their crime was so horrible,” the Independent newspaper said in an editorial published Monday, “that they have joined that select band of prisoners . . . against whom almost everyone in the country feels entitled to hold strongly punitive opinions.

“But it is a test of our collective commitment to the principles of justice that we are able to overcome those feelings in the belief that people can change,” the paper noted.

Columnist Lynda Lee-Potter opposed the release in the Daily Mail tabloid Wednesday, saying the boys’ rehabilitation was insufficient grounds for freedom.

“They are in custody not only to protect society but to be punished, to demonstrate that when evil is detected in our midst we have the courage to confront it,” Lee-Potter wrote. “A considered desire for punishment is based, not on venom, but on an acceptance that society will disintegrate unless evil is countered with adequate retribution.”

Retribution in this case is for a murder committed after Denise Bulger let go of her son’s hand ever so briefly to pay for meat in a butcher shop. Two boys skipping school that day beckoned James away from her. A security camera caught the three leaving a shopping center in Bootle on Merseyside, and a couple of dozen witnesses saw them walking to the railroad tracks, where Venables and Thompson poured blue enamel paint into James’ eyes, kicked him and beat him to death with bricks and an iron bar.

The killing drew an outpouring of public grief, which quickly turned into anger. Seething crowds surrounded the court during the boys’ trial, stoned the van that brought the pair to court and cried, “Kill them!” Their parents were forced to move and change their names.

The boys were convicted of murder and sentenced to be held at “her majesty’s pleasure,” which meant they could be considered for parole after eight years. The sentences were later increased to 10 years by the former lord chief justice, Peter Taylor, and again to 15 years by the Tory Home Secretary Michael Howard, who said he was acting to “satisfy the requirements of retribution and deterrence.”

Attorneys for Venables and Thompson appealed to the House of Lords, whose Law Lords overturned Howard’s decision in 1997. Two years later, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the boys had not received a fair trial and that politicians should not be involved in determining their sentences.

The Labor Party government’s home secretary at the time, Jack Straw, accepted the judgment, throwing the case back to the British courts, which decided last October that it would not be beneficial for Venables and Thompson to serve time “in the corrosive atmosphere” of an adult prison.

The teenagers won a High Court injunction protecting their anonymity after they are freed from detention, and their cases were sent to parole hearings, which were held at secret locations this week. The parole board members are widely expected to give their assent based on psychiatric reports asserting that the two have made “exceptional progress” and understand the enormity of their actions as children. The two are expected to be released by August.

The teenagers have studied and passed high school exams with good grades while serving in high-security youth detention centers. They have lost their thick Liverpool accents and are to be given new names, made-up histories and safe houses--measures frequently taken for criminal witnesses and Irish Republican Army informers but not for such high-profile convicts in Britain.

James’ mother, who has remarried and goes by Denise Fergus, has said the boys have not served long enough and should graduate to punishment in an adult prison. She suggested in a BBC interview Wednesday that she could “live with” 15-to-20-year prison terms.

Her “Justice for James” campaign has lobbied against their parole.

“We don’t believe seven years and eight months, even for 10-year-olds, is a punishment or deterrent for the magnitude of the crime committed,” said the group’s spokesman, Chris Johnson.

“The parole board has to decide whether there is a risk if they are let out,” he said. “We believe there is evidence that the parole board can’t be sure one or both of them do not suffer from psychopathic disorders. It is not safe to let them out yet.”

Many of Fergus’ former neighbors agree. A poll of nearly 42,000 people published in the Liverpool Echo newspaper last week showed that respondents opposed the teenagers’ release by a ratio of 5 to 1.

Fergus’ grief puts her views beyond reproach, say columnists who disagree with her, but does not excuse citizens who seeking revenge.

Many commentators say that to send the 18-year-olds to an adult prison would subject them to physical and psychological abuse that prisoners often mete out to convicts who have harmed children.

“Either we bite the bullet and let them out now and try to re-integrate them, or we put them in a swamp and say, ‘That’s it,’ ” said Chris Jenks, a sociology professor at Goldsmiths College, University of London, who has followed the case.

From the outset, he said, the British public and press have treated Venables and Thompson as monsters, not minors.

“They seem to have been saying when children kill children, that is the end of childhood,” Jenks said. “Two children committed a crime and were evacuated from the category of children. They were reduced to monsters and everyone forgot they were two sad little boys.”

Now, he added, the debate centers in large part on how much it will cost to provide them with new identities rather than on their right to finish sentences and begin life anew.

Columnist Mary Riddell, writing in the Observer newspaper on Sunday, concurred.

“Last week, Timothy McVeigh died in sanitized peace after a liter of mint chocolate chip ice cream and a poetry reading,” Riddell wrote. “Does the absence of a death penalty make us less barbarous? Not when a brutal or misguided minority sees Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, punished now and hopefully redeemed, as dead men walking.”