Children Who Murder: Indeterminate Sentencing in Law and Practice
| Author | Nigel Stone |
| DOI | 10.1177/1473225418762966 |
| Date | 01 April 2018 |
| Published date | 01 April 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Legal Commentary |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1473225418762966
Youth Justice
2018, Vol. 18(1) 82 –95
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1473225418762966
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Children Who Murder:
Indeterminate Sentencing
in Law and Practice
Nigel Stone
If the premise is accepted that murder is a uniquely grave crime, how should this be
reflected where the perpetrator was a child aged under-18? Is there a place for indeter-
minate or life detention, in particular as a mandatory outcome? Having regard to the
principle enshrined in Article 37 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (United
Nations (UN), 1989) that ‘neither capital punishment nor life imprisonment without
possibility of release’ shall be imposed for offences committed by anyone aged under-
18, and that ‘imprisonment of a child … shall be used only as a measure of last resort
and for the shortest appropriate period of time’, read in tandem with Rule 17(1)(a) of
the Beijing Rules (UN, 1985), proposing that sanctions should reflect not just the grav-
ity of the offence and the needs of society but also the circumstances and the needs of
the juvenile, the children’s rights advocacy network CRIN (Child Rights International
Network) has conducted a series of surveys of the use of the ‘inhuman sentence’ of
imprisoning children for life, within the Commonwealth (2012), Europe (2014) and the
world (2015). The latter reported that this form of sanction remained ‘rife’, being then
available in 73 states, including 46 within the Commonwealth, while in Europe it had
been retained only by Cyprus, France and the United Kingdom.
Meantime in the United States, untroubled by the writ of the UN Convention, a sequence
of Supreme Court judgements from Roper v Simmonds (2005) 543 US 551 to Montgomery
v Louisiana (2016) 136 S. Ct. 718 (usefully summarised in a Policy Brief by Rovner for
The Sentencing Project, 2017; see also Ford, 2017) have reined back first from use of
capital punishment for child offenders and latterly of life without prospect of parole.
This Commentary addresses developments in the relevant law, requiring detention at
the pleasure of the sovereign, and its application within England and Wales.
Corresponding author:
Nigel Stone, School of Psychology, University of East Anglia, Elizabeth Fry Building, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK.
Email: n.stone@uea.ac.uk
762966YJJ0010.1177/1473225418762966Youth JusticeStone
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