Dominic Casciani

But just the other thing on the quality of arms, bear in mind as well that any offender

who receives a sentence which they feel is unduly harsh can appeal the sentence, even if they're guilty.

So you can go to the Court of Appeal and say, look, I accept I'm guilty of this crime, but the 10 years, come on, it was only worth five, something like that.

So an awful lot of the Court of Appeal's work is reviewing sentences.

And very often you'll see the Court of Appeal day in, day out, we just don't report these, tweaking sentences.

taking six months off one, adding two years to another or whatever.

It's all about trying to get consistency across the system and trying to be fair as well.

We will likely never know the identity of these teenage boys.

Well, that's a complicated one.

Judges aren't afraid to lift the anonymity orders

on youth offenders but it only happens if they're sent to youth custody okay it doesn't happen if they've got a community sentence so we can i can think of many cases down the years where um it's been the in the whole scheme of national news it's you know it's been a shocking local case but not really a massive national case and a local judge in a local crown court

will name the young offenders, particularly in relation to knife crime and gang crime.

A lot of that goes on.

But that's where they've sent those young offenders into some form of custody.

It tends to happen when they're older.

So the older the teenager is...

up to the age of 18, the more likely they are to be named in relation to a violent offence.

The younger they are, the less likely it is that they're going to be named.

The naming of Thompson and Bennables, the two boys who killed James Bulger in Liverpool many, many years ago, that was a real outlier that those were named.

Those two boys at the time.