The two 15-year-old girls convicted of the murder of Angela Wrightson have each been sentenced to 15 years’ detention at “her majesty’s pleasure”.
The somewhat arcane term implies the possibility of detention of the pair – who the judge said must remain anonymous – for an indeterminate period and is equivalent to a life sentence for an adult defendant.
The two child killers of the toddler James Bulger, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, who were only 10 at the time they abducted and murdered the two-year-old in 1993, were also sentenced to be detained at her majesty’s pleasure. They were both released after eight years and given new identities.
But before Bulger’s murder, the most notorious child who had killed in the UK was Mary Bell. Bell was just 11 when she was found guilty of the manslaughter of two small boys in Newcastle in 1968 and detained at her majesty’s pleasure. She was released at the age of 23 and, like Thompson and Venables, she was given lifelong anonymity under a new identity.
Mr Justice Globe, the judge sentencing the teenage girls, acknowledged that one had been suffering from a mental disorder and that neither could “withstand mainstream education”.
But he did not appear, in his sentencing remarks, to contemplate any alternative form of custody or treatment for the girls who sat in court surrounded by carers.
Had they been adults, the judge said, they would been serving far longer terms. Their youth was one mitigating factor he was prepared to take into account.
If the teenagers are eventually released they will remain on licence for the rest of their lives.
By preserving their anonymity, Mr Justice Globe said, he was providing some form of protection and recognising that they were “extremely vulnerable to outside pressures”.
