UK Facebook Adult Predators, jailed for 35 and 22yrs
Two different murderers that used Facebook to track down their victims, one of whom pretended to be a different person to kidnap and murder a 17 year old girl, received life sentences of 35 and 22 years this week in British Courts.
The stories are at the BBC here and here respectively. The first case has now moved on to analysing the police handling of the case due to the admission of murder which sped up the legal process.
We have not written an entry about Jon Venables, one of the 1993 murderers of two year old James Bulger in Liverpool, England. A Facebook group calling for him to be named before any trial on his as-yet-unconfirmed new criminal charges, slandered an innocent man who had been mistaken for the killer as an adult on previous occasions (despite clearly having a different hair colour to the offender and being on the outside whilst Venables is back in prison). The group in the course of being shut down but as with the Baby P campaign, it continues through text messaging.
The UK media is now listing every possible crime it can think of to try to get Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, to name the correct charge through a process of elimination. Therefore, it’s the newspapers that must take responsibility for David Calvert’s persecution.
We will report on any such formal charge when it actually happens and write about the case properly when it is over, later this year or early next year.
