Yahoo Lifestyle Should Child Killers Be Locked Up For Life?
Sutherland station, the scene of Janine Balding's abduction.
Bev Balding’s hands trembled as she watched the judge enter Courtroom Six of Sydney’s Supreme Court to hand down his sentence. For weeks on end, she had sat on the cold, unforgiving benches of the public gallery, steeling herself to remain in the same room as the men guilty of murdering her daughter.
If that 3.45am phone call with the terrible news, two years earlier, had been the start of her nightmare, the trial offered a chance of some small consolation. All she could hope for now was justice. Janine was never coming back.
The 20-year-old bank teller had been kidnapped, repeatedly raped and drowned in a shallow dam. Now the young men who had done that to her were facing the consequences.
The harrowing case had caused a public outcry and on that spring day of the sentencing – September 18, 1990 – the old sandstone building was packed. Journalists jostled for position. Members of the public mouthed abuse at the three convicted murderers sitting in the dock. Aside from anything else, their youth was shocking. The perpetrators were aged 14, 16 and 22 at the time of the crime.
The presiding judge made no bones about the fate he felt the youths deserved. A life sentence – and best to throw away the key.
“This surely must be one of the most barbaric murders ever committed in the sad criminal history of this state,” said Justice Peter Newman in his address. “To sentence people so young to long terms of imprisonment is of course a heavy task. However … I believe I have no alternative. So grave is the nature of this case that I recommend that none of these offenders should ever be released.”
The public gallery erupted in applause. Bev Balding wept. Her husband, Kerry, walked outside to a barrage of camera flashes; in hishand he held the unsigned Father’s Day card found in Janine’s abandoned car.
“They should be put to death,” Bev told reporters. “People say that bringing back the death penalty is stooping to the level of the criminals. It’s not. Stooping to their level would be to terrorise them as they did to Janine.”
Public sentiment was just as strong. Janine’s death came two years after the equally brutal rape and murder of nurse Anita Cobby, and Australians were enraged. What monsters had we allowed to live in our society? And how could two children commit such hideous acts?
Justice Newman’s recommendation that Janine’s killers never be released did not, in fact, have legal force until almost a decade later, when then NSW premier Bob Carr introduced retrospective legislation to ensure nine of the state’s worst killers would be “cemented in their cells”. The only way they could be considered for release was if they were dying or so incapacitated they could not commit a crime.
Meanwhile, several appeals lodged by the men failed. So it looked as if that was that. Last year, however, the lawyers for two of Janine’s killers, Bronson Blessington and Matthew Elliott, lodged a complaint with the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC). Their lawyers argued that, regardless of the terrible nature of the crime, their sentences breached the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the men should have been treated as juveniles and given the prospect of one day applying for parole.
The UNHRC concluded Australia was in breach of its human rights obligations by allowing children to be sentenced to life in prison without the genuine possibility of parole. It was “cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment” and it called on the federal government to review the case.
With the exception of some states in America, Australia is the only country that still has children imprisoned forever. Even in the US, there have been recent test cases challenging life sentences without parole for juveniles, arguing that even the worst young offenders should be allowed a chance, at some point, at rehabilitation.
It’s an issue that strikes at the core of our views about the role of prison and how much compassion, understanding or trust we are prepared to extend to people guilty of murder. Do we see prison as a place of punishment and permanent exile, or a stopover on the way to possible rehabilitation and reintegration? What about public safety? Is it possible to change a “bad seed”? And is the concept of a second chance something we keep at the heart of our justice system?
Or do we believe that some crimes are so horrific that their young perpetrators are beyond rehabilitation and should never be let loose again?
Janine Balding was feeling excited when she left work in Sydney’s CBD at 4.30pm on September 8, 1988. The 20 year old, wearing her green State Bank uniform and with a mop of curly hair framing her smiling face, had a home loan application in her handbag to fill out with her fiancé, Steven Moran. The couple were due to be married the following March.
A few blocks away, five young people – four boys and a girl – had met by chance at a homeless refuge. They would spend the next 48 hours wandering the streets, stealing food, swigging booze and sleeping in empty train carriages, until one made the chilling suggestion that would become a recurring headline: “How about we go and get a sheila and rape her?”
Soon they were on the train to Sutherland, in Sydney’s south, terrorising school kids and taunting commuters with a pornographic magazine. Janine, known as Neenie to her family, was also heading for Sutherland station, where her car was parked after she had stayed at her fiancé’s house the night before.
The homeless gang initially approached 19-year-old Kristine Mobberly in the Sutherland station car park and asked for money. After she spotted a knife in the hand of one of the boys, she locked her car doors and sped home to tell her partner.
The couple went to Sutherland Police Station and reported the incident, but, on their way back home, they were horrified to see a woman in a green State Bank uniform being hassled by the same group beside her car. They drove back to the police station, but by the time officers arrived at the scene, the car was gone. Mobberly would later say she would forever live with guilt.
Three of the youths – Bronson Blessington, 14, Matthew Elliott, 16, and Stephen “Shorty” Jamieson, 22 – forced Janine into the back seat of her car and pinned her there. They drove off and along the way, Elliott raped her while Blessington held a knife to her throat and Jamieson held her legs apart. In the front seat, Carol Arrow, 15, gave her boyfriend, Wayne Wilmot, 15, a blow job as he drove the stolen car along the freeway, somehow oblivious to the horror behind them. (They would later be convicted as accessories.)
Janine begged to be let go. She promised she wouldn’t report them. However, Blessington, Elliott and Jamieson continued to rape her repeatedly. Elliott forced his penis into Janine’s mouth to stifle her screams. He sliced her skirt off with a knife to frighten her and Blessington used it as a gag.
Wilmot pulled off the freeway to a shallow, hidden dam in Sydney’s outer west where, in the fading evening light, they dragged Janine out of the car, over a barbed wire fence into the mud. They raped her several more times as she screamed in pain. Then, the talk turned to murder. Using a rope from the car, they hogtied Janine in a foetal position and held her face down in the shallow water. She was stripped of her engagement ring, which was sold the next day, and her bank card, which was used to withdraw $300. In a final act of helplessness, Janine grasped a clump of waterweed with her left hand.
David Balding, who was 10 years old when his sister was murdered, says his mother stayed strong until she died in 2013, attending every court date, and forever campaigning to keep her daughter’s killers in jail. Janine’s father, Kerry, still works as a joiner in the NSW town of Wagga Wagga with David. Her fiancé, Steve, married in 1991. Witness Kristine Mobberly is still close with the Baldings.
“In Mum’s mind, there was nothing we could do for Janine, but it’s the next family, it’s the next girl,” says David. “Those low-lifes should never come out of jail. They’ve got nothing to offer society. My sister doesn’t get a second chance, so why should they?”
The NSW government rejected the UN’s findings in November and has no plans to release the men, a response that came as a relief to the Baldings, who were horrified by yet another application for release.
Ruth Barson, a senior lawyer from the Human Rights Law Centre who represented Elliott and Blessington in the UN case, stresses that the question considered by the UN was not whether the two convicted men should be released, but about the legality of a system that doesn’t allow for even the consideration of rehabilitation.
“This was an exceptionally horrific crime, so I don’t think anybody could argue these two young people should not be in prison,” she says, “and neither do Blessington or Elliott. The question is, do they at some point in their lives get an opportunity to prove they can be released?” She says child criminals should be, and almost always are, treated differently from adults, just as under-18s aren’t allowed to vote or drink or drive.
Experts now know that brains don’t fully develop until the age of 25. In the case of Blessington and Elliott, they had a mental age of around 10. They were products of broken homes, kicked out on the streets, sexually abused, addicted to drugs and seriously impaired. Even the judge observed that the boys may have had “diminished responsibility” due to their mental condition and had good prospects of recovery. But he still recommended they never be released.
Research overwhelmingly shows that locking up children, especially those who have been abused and downtrodden as much as Blessington and Elliott, has a profoundly negative impact and makes them even more violent. It’s the least effective form of rehabilitation and the most expensive form of punishment, especially for juveniles.
According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, jails are “universities of crime” that only increase crime rates. It’s why it has been widely accepted in most Western countries, including Australia, since the mid 19th century that juveniles should be treated in a separate system that recognises their inexperience and immaturity.
In Spain, nearly every juvenile offender is sent to remote “re-education” centres, each with different levels of security, under a scheme introduced in the 1990s that operates on a different philosophy. In line with UN principles, it’s closer to “tough love”: nurturing and educating offenders rather than treating them as inmates to be controlled and further corrupted. Psychologists visit the detainees every day. Staff can ask judges to reconsider sentences at any time.
Such a system turns out to be much cheaper than a conventional prison and, its proponents argue, much more effective. Its main operator, an NGO called Diagrama, claims a 70 per cent reintegration rate for its offenders, in stark contrast to Australia, where more than 60 per cent of young prisoners reoffend within two years of release.
In Australia, some states have achieved success with restorative justice, which puts the victim and offender together for a mediation process, or juvenile engagement programs with education, family or leisure pursuits. Even the simple act of offering a vocational education training program can make a huge difference; a study in Queensland found that only 23 per cent of trainees returned to prison after two years. Such programs, however, are often politically unpopular and seen as being “soft on crime”. Had they been offered to Blessington and Elliott, could they have been rehabilitated?
Policeman Steve Pearson doesn’t have much time for those who killed Janine. As the case’s lead forensic investigator, Pearson scoured every inch of the dead woman’s muddy resting place and, to prepare for trial, delved into the street-urchin culture for two years. Her killers were far beyond help, he decided.
Their attitude throughout the trial was “couldn’t give a shit”, he says. They mouthed obscenities at journalists when the jury wasn’t watching. Elliott would look to Bev Balding in the public gallery with half a smile.
“I don’t believe people like that can be rehabilitated,” he says. “They knew what they were doing. I saw a lot in my 27 years with the police, and they were the absolute dregs of society.”
A string of high-profile crimes committed by offenders while on parole has bolstered the argument that such criminals can’t change. Wayne Wilmot, who served eight years for his part in Janine’s abduction and rape, committed an almost identical crime when he was released. In the UK, Jon Venables, one of the infamous child killers of toddler James Bulger, also committed further crimes.
But juvenile justice experts say many young prisoners aren’t being rehabilitated because we give them little chance.
Blessington and Elliot were thrown into hardened prisons straightaway. By 18, Blessington was in Goulburn Supermax, dubbed “the killing fields” for its many in-house murders, and Elliott had been put into protective custody because he gave evidence about an inmate-on-inmate assault and became a target himself.
It becomes a tragic Catch-22, says Ross Homel, an internationally renowned child criminologist from Griffith University. A child offender’s chance of release becomes slim if they are brutalised in prison. But that child was given little chance by being thrown there in the first place.
“We’re often punishing kids for being victims themselves,” he says. “The consensus, based on overwhelming evidence, is that sending people to jail is not the answer but unfortunately public opinion is where it was in the Stone Age.”
He thinks it says more about us as a society, rather than the offenders, that we tell some children there’s no chance they can change.
“I just don’t accept that there’s never any hope for change,” he adds. “[Elliott and Blessington] committed a heinous crime and needed to go to jail, but there should always be some hope for change. Otherwise, what are we as a species?”
Ruth Barson said the two men, now in their 40s, have accepted culpability and it “weighs incredibly heavily on them”. While not much more is known about Elliott’s life in prison, Blessington insists that he has become a radically different man. He converted to Christianity at 16 and said he “weeps endlessly” for the things he has done.
In 2005, Peter Breen, a former NSW politician, who adopted Jamieson, Elliott and Blessington’s cause, said Blessington is “living proof that children who make mistakes literally grow out of their problems, that juvenile offenders can be rehabilitated and that giving people a second chance is … at the heart of the justice system”.
When he was in parliament, Breen read out a letter from Blessington: “I am extremely remorseful for my part in the crimes I was charged with and I’ll be the first one to say that I deserved to get a big sentence. But to leave me with nothing to hope for in this life is 10 times more severe than a death sentence. My father said it would have been more human for them … to have hung me when I was 14.”
Many years after Janine’s death, several lawyers and a former judge appeared on TV for a panel discussion opposite Bev Balding. One after the other, they all said they were “appalled” that a child would be imprisoned for life.
Blessington’s grandfather, Mat, who spent some years raising the boy and has since passed away, told the diminutive mother from country NSW that she needed to forgive his grandson, as much for her own recovery process.
“My answer is no way,” replied Bev. “Never ever.”
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