Quote from another Guardian article:
The lord chief justice, Lord Woolf, must have known that there would be outrage if he cut the 15-year sentence which the Conservative home secretary Michael Howard ordered for the two young men who murdered James Bulger. In the event, he has cut it by even more than some of his liberal colleagues expected, reinstating the eight-year tariff set by the trial judge.
His decision is courageous and right. Mr Howard insisted the release of the two young killers should not be based purely on the risk that they posed, but also on "public acceptability". Stacked in his office then were boxes of vouchers from Sun readers, insisting that the two killers be detained for life. But the reason for having a criminal justice system is to lift sentencing above mob rule. The Howard approach came dangerously close to the traditions of lynch law.
The reason why Lord Woolf was required to set a new tariff yesterday was a ruling in the European court of human rights last year, declaring the sentencing powers of British home secretaries "unlawful" under the European convention. Yesterday's judgment is bound to reopen the attack on the court. But it is not only foreign judges who see it as crucial to take sentencing out of the hands of the politicians: most British policy-making bodies do so too. Two all-party parliamentary committees have backed it, the House of Lords has made unsuccessful attempts to add this change to various criminal justice bills and the British judiciary is united on the principle.
Punishment, Lord Woolf argued in an interview earlier this week, should be a mixture of retribution, deterrence, reparation and rehabilitation. But that last ingredient, he signalled, was perhaps the most important of all: "... above all, you want to try to achieve a sentence which will make the likelihood of that person leading a lawful life in the future greater, not less". These are not normal offenders. They were extremely damaged young people, who under the psychological and social care staff of the secure units have made enormous progress, including acceptance of the enormity of their crime.
The anger of the Bulger family is wholly understandable. When families suffer such a terrible trauma, pumping up retributive instincts helps keep them going. Yet medical studies show that in the long term that reaction is not enough. Hard though it comes, some form of forgiveness is needed for scars to heal.