Not the least disturbing aspect of the release of James Bulger's murderers is the fact that it was held back until after the General Election. Such is the public's disgust at this travesty of justice, that, had the killers been freed three weeks ago, Blair might have lost the election. But there are deeper questions to be raised about the whole business - questions which neither the Home Secretary nor the prison authorities have answered adequately.

Venables and Thompson have not been punished for their crime. They have been held in secure units and given psychiatric counselling. They have lived lives of consummate ease with many privileges such as televison, video and audio systems and visits to football matches. And now, after a mere eight years, they have been freed. The first thing to be said about this is that it disgracefully undervalues human life. The second is that their release sends all the wrong signals to other psychopaths and evil people who might consider murdering a child. Cruel, insane people, who might be deterred from vile deeds by the fear of serious punishment, may see what has happened to Venables and Thompson and commit murder with alacrity. James's killers have achieved a sort of evil stardom. Psychopaths love the limelight, and what has happened to these two killers will only encourage others to do the same.

Millions of pounds of taxpayers' money has been spent on the killers in their captivity and millions more is being spent in giving them new identities and new lives. This sets a dangerous precedent as, so we learn from the BBC, even now defence lawyers for 73 other murderers are arguing that their clients should be treated in the same way. It is not even as if Thompson and Venables have shown any remorse or penitence. For example, Thompson, while in a secure unit, made friends with Leon McEwan, a convicted fire-raiser. After McEwan's release, he and Thompson wrote letters to each other and declared themselves "forever friends". What a friend McEwan turned out to be! He sold 30 of Thompson's letters to a newspaper. In his letters, Thompson boasts about his "five-star lifestyle" in the secure unit, threatens other inmates who have crossed him and indulges in a lot of perverted sexual boasting.

It is clear that it will be extremely difficult, and perhaps impossible, for Venables and Thompson to go unnoticed. In an age of advanced surveillance techniques and global communication over the Internet, someone sooner or later will track them down. There is an enormous sense of outrage among the public against what they see as the untimely release of these two killers, and perhaps someone will be tempted to kill them in their turn. If this were to happen, it would merely stretch out the tragedy to further lengths of injustice - for killing by vigilantes is never right. But the true awfulness of the affair is revealed by the fact that, if Venables and Thompson were to be murdered, a great number of people in this country would say, "Serve 'em right!" And that would show how public morality had been corrupted precisely by the primary injustice of freeing James's killers too soon.

And so we come back to the overriding moral issue which I raised at the start: for the sake of the health of society, for the public good, for justice to prevail over barbarism, there has to be some relation between the crime and the punishment. Quite simply, a society which pampers and indulges murderers and then sets them free after a short incarceration, is a society which has lost the sense of the difference between good and evil.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange

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