(May 25) — The jury in London has spoken, but so have the critics. And the consensus seems to be that two boys — ages 10 and 11 — and the 8-year-old girl they were found guilty of trying to rape had no place being in a criminal court in the first place. “Astonishing and depressing” and “absurd” and “we are making demons of our children” were some of the words used after the Central Criminal Court verdict was handed down Monday. They were accompanied by calls for reform in the prosecution of children in England and Wales, including raising the age of criminal responsibility from 10. In Scotland and Northern Ireland, where the legal systems differ from England's, such cases would go before a children's panel hearing, not a criminal court. Some of the most pointed criticism came from Britain's former director of public prosecutions, Sir Ken MacDonald, currently a professor of law at the London School of Economics. “Put bluntly, we've been witnessing a spectacle that has no place in an intelligent society: very young children do not belong in adult criminal courts. They rarely belong in criminal courts at all,” he wrote in The Times of London. The boys, who were both 10 at the time of the offense, which they denied committing, have been placed on Britain's sex offenders' registry ahead of sentencing. They were cleared of rape in a case in which the girl changed her story under cross-examination, saying she had lied because she was afraid her mother wouldn't give her candy if she knew she'd willingly pulled down her underpants. MacDonald said, “We need to be more mature than to design a system of youth justice around the barbarism of the most extreme cases. 'You show me yours and I'll show you mine' litters every playground in the country. When did we forget?” A lawyer with the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children said children find cross-examination “very difficult to deal with,” a view supported by the U.K.'s Criminal Bar Association. “If an adult is saying to a very young child something didn't happen, the child may be very conflicted by that because it's used to obeying adults,” the association's Paul Mendelle told the BBC. The founder of Kidscape, a charity designed to protect children from bullying, was quoted in media reports as saying it was “absolutely wrong” to try the boys at the Old Bailey court, which takes its name from the street on which it's located. “I think it horribly reflects on our whole system, that a case like this with children should be tried in this way,” founder Michele Elliott said. “It should have been held in camera with no publicity at all. The whole thing is horrific.” The judge refused to dismiss the case when the girl changed her story, saying it was for the jury to decide if she could be trusted. The guilty verdict came down 10 to 2. “Attempted rape is a serious offense and can have long-term effects on the victim,” Felicity Gerry, a criminal lawyer and author of “The Sexual Offenses Handbook,” told The Times. “Decisions to prosecute children are never made lightly. But it is hard to see why the decision was made to pursue [this] prosecution.” Philip Johnston, a columnist for London's Daily Telegraph, called the conviction “astonishing and depressing.” “As a nation, we keep saying we want to stop children growing up too quickly; and yet, when they do childish things we attach adult guilt and morality to them, drag them into court and put them on sex offender registers and hate databases,” he wrote. “We must be mad.” added by: TimALoftis
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