Child Defendants at Crown Court: ‘Very Rare’?

DOI10.1177/14732254211008670
Published date01 August 2021
Date01 August 2021
AuthorNigel Stone
Subject MatterLegal Commentary
https://doi.org/10.1177/14732254211008670
Youth Justice
2021, Vol. 21(2) 230 –240
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/14732254211008670
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Child Defendants at
Crown Court: ‘Very Rare’?
Nigel Stone
A Story of Peer Collective Violence
At age 13, it appears that BB was associating with older and more criminal minded ado-
lescents, a familiar narrative in accounting for early escalation to more serious offending.
His ethnicity is not identified. When the evening episode (in January 2020) involving him
and three others came subject of subsequent judicial scrutiny, it was surprisingly unclear
how much older than him those associates were, though one (Z.) was understood to be
either 16 years or 17 years and they were each aged under-18 (see Endnote 17). Z. had
arranged to meet V. aged 16, a boy from whom he periodically bought small amounts of
cannabis but when V. arrived on his moped, Z. was joined by three others, one of whom
(L.) pointed a handgun (in fact an imitation firearm) at V. and demanded his moped key.
For good measure, Z. displayed a knife in his waistband, telling V. that he was prepared to
use it if necessary to get what they wanted, and a third (H.) punched V.’s face causing a
nose bleed. The fourth boy, understood to be BB, took a pouch of tobacco from V.’s
pocket. Surrounded and outnumbered, V. attempted to walk away, pushing his moped,
being punched from behind and he ‘felt a stab to his left upper arm’. V. managed to mount
his moped and tried to ride off but when he stopped at a red traffic light he was attacked
again, being knocked to the ground and sustaining a puncture stab wound to the thigh. His
assailants ran from the scene when shouted at by a passer-by.
Just over 3 weeks later, BB and his three associates came before their local youth court
(comprising a bench of lay magistrates), charged with robbery (robbing V. of his tobacco
pouch) and attempted robbery (V.’s moped). There is no indication that BB had any for-
mal criminal history; it is also not clear from the ensuing judicial review judgment whether
any his three co-defendants had a prior criminal record. The prosecution was able to offer
the youth court ‘very limited information about the role BB played in the attack on’ and
the violence displayed towards V., beyond asserting that BB had taken a pouch of tobacco
from V. after V. had been threatened by others, relying predominantly on the nature of the
episode viewed as a whole and his participation in what must have been deemed a joint
Corresponding author:
Nigel Stone, School of Psychology, Lawrence Stenhouse Building, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK.
Email: n.stone@uea.ac.uk
1008670YJJ0010.1177/14732254211008670Youth JusticeStone
research-article2021
Legal Commentary

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