To hope William Cornick spends at least the next 50 years in prison if not the rest of his life.

[smokepole]

William Cornick should never be released from prison, for his horrific and brutal attack on Ann Maguire. The judge has sentenced him to a minimum sentence of 20 years, no doubt based on his age. However, despite his teenage years and the stupidity and thoughtlessness that comes from these years his crime was so appalling he should spend the rest of his life in prison.

The only country that sentences children to full life terms is the USA, that is called a injustice by most of the world , because it does not allow for rehabilitation of children. William Cornick can not be rehabilitated for this crime and despite what the European court of human rights will say , he should serve the maximum sentence available under English law "Life in Prison".

The parents of Cornick must be living in a nightmare, wondering how they have bred such an evil child and thinking they are to blame for not stopping him from committing this heinous crime.

Brooke. You bring up some points. I wonder though are we going to have a news blackout about him now and will he get a new identity if he is released in 20-30 years time.

The other point is because it was an attack on a defenceless woman, will he be in segregation, even in a YOI . There are bound to people who will want to harm him inside .

Annie, what would you suggest in an ideal world scenario?

Wandafuca - didn't they change the borderline of criminal responsibility to accommodate the Bulger killers? I thought they did, but I could be wrong.

I also think Mary Bell is not the right case to compare this with, for a start she was only 11 (looking on Wiki) and was convicted of Manslaughter. Cornick had plenty of time to realise about his actions and stop his plan.

Did Mary Bell ( No excuse but different) commit her crimes in a moment of madness without time for reasoning to stop her as well as being only 11.

Nerf

I will have a think and get back to you. Am off to bed but didn't want to leave you unacknowledged. :)

Thank you. I'm really interested and torn. I don't want to be an apologist for murder but I am uncomfortable with the idea that some people are not able to learn how to adapt to societal norms,and should be locked away forever. As I said I don't know anything about this area.

There are not many cases to compare it to as there are so few children who kill in this country. MB's case is very similar to the two Jamie Bulger killers in terms of age and chaotic backgrounds. Those two have (by all limited accounts) turned out very differently.

I suppose the closest would be the boy who killed Philip Lawrence in Maida Vale. He's been released.

I guess I don't want to believe that any child is a lost cause and so to not even try to rehabilitate them seems wrong. He could have been anyone's child.

Sorry, I have only read the first page before commenting and I know this is a mumnet no-no but hey ho.

First of all I should say 2 things: I have not read any court transcripts or medical reports in this case nor am I involved in any way. Secondly, I am a psychiatrist working with mentally disordered offenders (adult men and women).

There is no such thing as a psychopath and the psychiatrists would not have said as such in their reports as it is not a diagnosis in icd 10 nor to my knowledge in dsm v. If it ain't in there, we don't just go ahead and make something up or use a label from popular fiction.

At 15, one cannot diagnose a personality disorder - individuals specifically have to be over 18 and even then, it should be made with caution as the personality is still forming.

This boy has committed an awful, tragic crime. He allegedly has boasted about it before and after and shown no remorse.

I don't think at this stage it can be taken that this is a key indicator that he in a sub human monster and should or could never be rehabilitated back into society. Lots of people who have committed violent crimes take a long time to show genuine remorse and victim empathy, it is a long slow journey and a painful one for almost every offender. Secondly, lots of violent offenders may show or express remorse and it makes not a jot of difference to their dangerousness , indeed some individuals with dis social personality disorder may have some understanding of how to manipulate others by doing so for their own ends,

So showing no remorse is not a sign he is damned. He is only 15. If some work can be done with him, rather than just flinging him into a YOI (where he will harden further) even in 5 years time he may be a very different individual. In 10 years time, he may still be processing just what an unforgivable thing he has done to Mrs maguire, her family, his peers and his parents and himself and consequently be on suicide watch for a prolonged period. And he will still have 10 more years to serve, minimum, at that point.

I do not think this child should have been named.

Sorry, as you were, will catch up with the thread now.

I see lilannie has beaten me to it .

Yes YOIs are very frightening places but the transition to an adult prison will be extremely difficult for a notorious prisoner, he may as well have a target painted on his forehead.

I can certainly agree with annie's observation that prison living conditions are awful. The cells are very basic and usually in bad condition then add in over crowding so that cells designed for one are shared. I would go mad.

I don't think he should have been named either. We lose something of our own humanity by doing so.

Posted too soon.

This article in the Guardian is very interesting. I recall reading it during the Bulger debate and being very curious at how two nations could differ so greatly in their response. However the parents in this case also differed greatly in their attitude regarding how the killers of their child should be treated (although please do not take this as any criticism of the Bulgers).

Regarding Nerfs question, any solution I might offer would obviously sound a tad Utopian BUT if money and attitudinal change could be ensured then I would set up therapeutic houses (such as we saw for serious personality disorders) where those juveniles accused and convicted of serious offences were managed solely by staff who were highly qualified in CAMHS and forensic mental health. The emphasis would be on developing personal and communal responsibility, non punitive (although obviously there needs to be strong boundaries in place), they would not be isolated from society because true rehab (whether that involves living outside of supervised residences or not) cannot happen in a vacuum- in order to feel a responsibility to society, one needs to feel ones part in it.

We also need major attitudinal changes. NO naming of minors. Severe punishment for anybody exposing aliases or attempting to.

The very expensive sex offenders programmes in prisons are a good place to start when looking at what might be done but they are very hard to evaluate other than from the point of what the prisoner would have done without participation in an offenders programme and for that to happen, there has to be release back into society. However the promulgation of deviant behaviour is also an important factor to address- what messages are being given to other inmates? If treatment has the effect of reducing the culture of 'deviance' then that is another success. Sadly these environments (prisons YOI) all too often encourage and celebrate the deviant action and attitude as opposed to the more constructive, societally approved ones.

Evaluating change in risk predictors following treatment is important as is combining expectations of a change in behaviour with support by staff. Treatment needs to combine group based interventions plus personalised, individual therapy that places personality and offending markers ( what the person likes to do/what they have done/how they do it/ what their opinion is of it) at its heart. One size fits all is NOT the way to go but sadly our governmental MH practice with its fobbing off of people with 6-8 wks of CBT is in opposition to this in general and gaining increased funding in a climate of hate and fear towards offenders like this young boy is very hard.

That support for the MDT is vital too- treatment is only as good as the team providing it and they need excellent clinical, peer and management supervision plus good access to monies for research- good practice has to be publicised so it can grow. The most vulnerable good practice is that which is isolated from society in general.

leaningtoweroflisa: "There is no such thing as a psychopath and the psychiatrists would not have said as such in their reports as it is not a diagnosis in icd 10 nor to my knowledge in dsm v. If it ain't in there, we don't just go ahead and make something up or use a label from popular fiction."

Are you saying the term psychopath was just invented by popular fiction writers? That it's never been used by respectable academics or psychiatrists? Did I imagine The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson and Zero Degrees of Empathy by Simon Baron Cohen?

Or are you simply saying that psychopath is the wrong term and that we should be using some other terminology such as antisocial personality disorder?

Yes, it is an outdated term. Not one I encountered at work. We used antisocial personality disorder and formerly sociopathic personality disorder. BUT there are so many subsets of symptoms, assciated features and tandem conditions. If you look at the ICD and DSM you will see the clauses and subclauses that accompany every psychiatric condition and modify its presentation.

And Ronson's book was amusing but pretty superficial and populist. I wouldn't use it as a reliable source of information on mental health.

I think Hackmum that the third option is what Leaning was saying.

LilAnnie The Norwegian method has been shown to have huge successes. I agree with you. The boy is a child and should never have been named, there is no possible way that naming him has benefitted anybody.

Leaning, the sentencing report states that the leading psychiatrist involved with the case judged Cornick to have psychopathic tendencies. So he seems to think the concept exists.

I would imagine that the newspaper have applied that term or paraphrased him. Papers are keen to use it because it is short, dramatic and has the word 'psycho' in it.

No psychiatrist or staff member I have worked with use that term.

lil no, I think if you read the judges sentencing reports(there is a link further up the thread) as far as I remember as I read it all late last night this is the exact word used and has nothing to do with the newspapers.

Well I stand by my statement that nobody I have worked with uses that term anymore. It fell out of favour some time ago. I don't know why Paul used the term 'psychopathic' because it is not one I have heard used in modern clinical practice.

Anyway, hopefully he will be found a place at the Keppel, the only specialist unit I know of that can offer any chance of rehabilitation. :(

Annie, not sure if you are familiar at all with the Dutch system of TBS? It stands for "terbeschikking stellen" and roughly translates as “being placed at the disposal of the court/government”, and it's for mentally ill offenders, they are detained in special clinics (tbs klinieken), not prisons or young offenders institutes, and MH treatment is at the centre of the whole program. From the little I know about it, it sounds similar to what you would like to see in the UK.

With particular reference to this bit you said

“they would not be isolated from society because true rehab (whether that involves living outside of supervised residences or not) cannot happen in a vacuum- in order to feel a responsibility to society, one needs to feel ones part in it.”

I am not sure exactly how it works in Holland. Not all patients in a TBS clinic are allowed outside the walls of the clinic. I think they have to show they are safe enough first and judged (by psychiatrists) to pose no risk to the public, at which time they are allowed short outings with 100% staff supervision. Think along the lines of, trip to the supermarket or library, accompanied by one or more members of staff. However as they are judged to be getting better they are (eventually) allowed unsupervised leave. This be can be for an afternoon, a day or a weekend. Preparing the offenders/patients for their reintegration back into society.

On paper I like this system. I do agree that to rehabilitate offenders we can’t exclude them completely from society. So I agree there has to be some system to either aid them to reintegrate gradually and safely, or not to totally exclude them in the first place. However, where this all falls down for me is the amount of TBS patients (offenders? I am not really sure if they are classed as offenders or patients) who commit crimes, or leg it, when they are granted unsupervised leave.

I am just quoting from Wikipedia here, and the page is in Dutch so pointless linking, but it gives a long list of cases where TBS patients have committed crimes when released on leave, crimes including violent rape, rape of children, and more than a handful of murders, all in recent years. I know this is a big issue in Holland and one of the main reasons why a lot of Dutch people don’t support the system.

I don’t really know why I am writing this, apart from, when I was first made aware of the system in the Netherlands it struck me as so much more humane and pragmatic and better than the UK’s system. But as the years go on and I see it’s many failings, I am not as much a supporter of it as I once was. These TBS clinics can be, and are, built in the middle of residential housing areas, and of course I understand why that is, as the patients ARE a part of our society. But do I want to be out walking my dog when the one "appeared to be doing so well on his medication and was responding so well to his treatment" patient/offender gets afternoon leave and sees a red mist and flip his lid?

I don't want to do the "not on my doorstep" thing. I want to be more for a system that is more about rehabilitation than about punishment. But I also want to be able to walk my dog without coming across an offender whose psychiatrist was a bit too optimistic when granting unsupervised leave.

I guess I want to be more liberal thinking and support a care/treatment based approach for mentally ill detainees, but I also want to be safe. I am just not sure if the two go hand in hand.

That Guardian article made very interesting reading by the way. How can two countries with such similar cultures treat similar child murderers so differently? Rhetorical question, obviously.

What hasn't come out the reporting of the case was the reason why he murdered her. What did she do to piss him off? Apparently he was wound up by her for three years. Did he just reach the end of his tether? Was he driven to it? I wonder what his defence lawyer would have said. I have to say I am intrigued.

driven to it? sheesh.

You haven't been reading the reports have you windchime he was a high achieving pupil who was not doing well in Spanish - she was pushing him to achieve his potential in exactly the same way as she pushed all the other pupils to achieve theirs. The consistent story from pupils and ex pupils was that she never gave up on a student.

Yeah, mental health nurses who I speak with regularly told me that sociopath/psychopath are not terms that are used anymore.

I was all for locking him away and throwing away the key but after reading this thread I am now on the fence, leaning more to the other side now.

Very interesting thread.

Apparently he was wound up by her for three years

That may be his perspective, but I tend to think that his perspective is seriously warped. There may well be a 'reason' but the reason could be bizarre and irrational.

And actually, even if Anne Maguire picked on him quite badly, you could not for one moment see his murder of her as understandable or justified (which is what "driven to it" implies).

It really worries me that when men and boys kill women and girls there is often an undercurrent of this-a rapid suggestion that she might have or must have pushed/nagged/drove/wound up him into killing her. It is morally and usually factually wrong. It isn't usually said when men kill men.

Mayy

I agree, it is a dilemma- the right to be protected from potential harm from high risk prisoners or patients and the need to rehabilitate and show remorse.

Basically most errors are errors of risk assessment compounded by poor resources . Get the risk assessment right and everything else follows. I know it can never be an exact science and we need to balance acceptable risk in terms of allowing people to show they can be trusted alongside that factor, again, of protecting the public.

Re the psychopath comment- having re-read the pre sentencing comments by the Judge, it is the judge who uses the term 'psychopath' w/ regards to the accused. In this section of the report, he directly quotes, paraphrases and offers his own judgement. He is not quoting Paul directly when the term 'Psychopath' is used but describing the nature of the psych assessment which would NOT have Dx the defendant as sociopathic/psychopathic or as having antisocial personality disorder. Adjustment disorder is a clear hint though, of what they expect to be diagnosing him with when he is of an age sadly IMO.

I am aware that he may well have been referring to that term as used in the court reports or he may be applying a term that he has become accustomed to (because it was used in the past). I don't know but I will ask and find out.

In the court reports he claimed it was going to be either murder or suicide. He had been places on internal exclusion in the past for his behaviour and rudeness towards her.