Justice has to have a chance to work
I'M as nosy as the next person, but there are times when I think my curiosity should remain unsatisfied.
What the public finds interesting is not necessarily the same as the public interest, but the dividing line between these two concepts is becoming increasingly blurred.
So it is with the recent revelations and gossip over Jon Venables, who along with Robert Thompson was jailed for the murder of a toddler, James Bulger, when the killers were 10 years old.
Now Venables has been returned to custody for breaching the terms of his release. He might have committed another offence - perhaps relating to child porn - and we want to know all about it.
Well, of course we do.
There are those - among them Carol Vorderman, who made her position clear on Question Time last week - who think that not only do James Bulger's parents have a right to know what Venables has done, but the rest of us do too.
It would be hard to say on what grounds that right is based, other than sheer prurience.
It's worth reminding ourselves of the argument for keeping the facts of the case concealed from the public: The more we know, the harder it will be for Venables to have a fair trial.
Demonstrating a refreshing resistance to tabloid pressure, the Justice Secretary Jack Straw said on Monday that it would not serve the interests of justice to divulge the details at this stage.
At the time of writing he is yet to cave to popular pressure.
Even those who think Venables surrendered his rights on the day he killed James Bulger must concede that it will be in no-one's interests if further attempts to prosecute him have to be abandoned on the grounds that no jury can be found that isn't aware of his identity.
When it comes to the right to know, James Bulger's mother has more of a claim than the rest of us to be kept in the loop.
But, while we all sympathise with her for the scarcely imaginable suffering she has endured, we should be wary of attritubing to her a wider authority.
Just as the grief-stricken parents of dead soldiers are not necessarily experts on foreign policy, so the families of murder victims are not necessarily the most level-headed arbiters of the public interest.
Along with Straw's resistance to tabloid pressure, the most sensible thing I've heard about this case came from the author Will Self, whose attitude on Question Time was a sober contrast to Vorderman's shrill populism.
Why should we suppose that children who kill are more 'evil' than adults who kill? he asked.
The implication is that there should be no special category of evil for James Bulger's killers. What's shocking about them - their youth - is also be a mitigating factor.
We're in danger sometimes of idealising childhood, and so are shocked when children turn out to be as capable of sadism and violence as adults. The temptation then is to label them as exceptionally evil, as monsters, less human than the rest of us.
The law sees it differently, as it should. However interested we are in what happened, justice will be better served in this case if we are kept in the dark.
awolstenholme@ywng.co.uk
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Sunday 12 February 2012
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