No Ordinary Boy
I agree with much of what David Aaronovitch has to say in this column in The Times because it's hard to understand how a young man could commit such a terrible and callous murder without being mentally ill, and therefore unfit to plead.
But having been tried and pled guilty in a criminal court rather than being detained under mental health legislation, I think it is right that this young man is given a very long sentence as a punishment for taking a completely innocent person's life and for plunging her family into years of misery as well.
So a minimum of 20 years seems quite reasonable to me in the circumstances and if it turns out that Will Cornick can face up to the enormity of his crime and perhaps be rehabilitated, then the justice system will have worked.
Let’s not get into a moral panic about killer schoolboys
It’s hard to see how naming this young killer will deter others
By David Aaronovitch - The Times
It is no consolation at all to the family and friends of Ann Maguire that her murder was unprecedented. Nevertheless it is the case that no pupil has ever before killed a teacher in a British classroom. As a reflection on society or as an event that holds lessons for us, the tragedy was about as indicative as a Saharan snowfall.
It was odd then for the judge in the case, Mr Justice Coulson, to cite as one reason for naming 16-year-old Will Cornick as the killer, that such an action might be a “potential deterrent” to others. Even if there were other potential classroom murderers it’s hard to see how they would be deterred by a very public name and a mass-reproduced face being attached to Mrs Maguire’s murderer. And, of course, there probably aren’t others.
It was strange, too, for psychiatrists to say that Cornick was not mentally ill. That may be true in the limited sense that he was capable of understanding what he was doing. But nothing about his state of mind leading up to the knife attack on Mrs Maguire suggests that he was mentally well. His belief that the teacher was solely responsible for the “shit” he thought his life had become, was borderline psychotic. The boy was in big trouble.
As ever in this country we have gone haring after the decoy rabbit. An exemplary sentence makes no sense, for there is no one to set an example to and we have no idea what kind of rehabilitation Cornick may be capable of. For these reasons the more careful Scandinavians, faced with similar crimes, refuse to name the young perpetrators and resist handing down very long sentences.
No one can be blamed (as some newspapers have implied) for failing to realise what Cornick was up to, nor will it be useful to go around trying to spot the tell-tale signs of would-be teacher killers. “Withdrawn” or quiet pupils can do without wannabe psycho-sleuths investigating them for signs of murderous weirdness.
Probably the most significant thing Cornick said after the murder was that, for him, it had been a choice between homicide and suicide. In 2012, for every 100,000 young men between the ages of 15 and 19, six killed themselves.
Yet had Cornick chosen this path, his death — though much more typical — might have been reported locally, and then forgotten about. It could be 50 years before we see another classroom murder — it will be days till the next young suicide.
