Dominic Casciani

and then take a view and that's why these sentences in exercises can be quite complicated and can often lead to outcomes which if you're not in course in hearing everything said over very often over an entire day

you may be a little bit surprised by the outcome.

And I have to stress, I wasn't in court for this one, so I don't know what the judge has said, and we don't have the judge's sentencing remarks.

So we're a little bit in the dark about how the whole process came about.

Yeah, let me give you an example from 10 years ago, a case which has always stuck in my mind, which is a very serious terrorism case, which was effectively, at the time it was a 14-year-old boy from Lancashire who was charged with preparation for acts of terrorism.

He was accused of effectively trying to organise a serious terrorism attack, along with other Islamic State supporters.

He was caught, he was brought to justice,

And it was a real dilemma for the sentencing judge in that case.

Now, that sentencing judge gave that young man, who can only be known as Boy S, gave him a life term, but with a minimum of five years, which meant by the time he reached the age of 2021, if he made progress in youth custody...

he would have a shot at getting out and being rehabilitated and going on to a normal life.

And in that case, it worked, because that young man left prison in his early 20s, and I've spoken to him and had long conversations with him since, and I reported his story some time ago.

And he's gone on to have, effectively, a happy and normal life, having gone through a lot of developmental issues he had as a young man,

addressed those, learned how to control himself and understand where he was wrong, and has moved on.

Now, that is the aspiration of the system.

The system is saying, young people, their brains aren't fully formed.

They haven't necessarily reached a point of maturity.

Things can change very, very rapidly, particularly in a teenage mind.

You've got to give time for these things to play out.

The difficulty we've got, Adam, in this case is we just don't know exactly what was said

in relation to these three young men.