The Supreme Court has ruled that a person charged as a child remains protected from identification under the Children Act 2001 even if they turn 18 while their criminal proceedings or appeals are continuing.
The ruling arose from the case of P.B., who was under 18 when he murdered Cameron Blair on January 16, 2020. P.B. pleaded guilty and was sentenced in April 2020, before his 18th birthday, to detention for life with a sentence review fixed for 2033.
Because he was a child when the proceedings began, section 93 of the Children Act prohibited reports revealing his identity. P.B. subsequently appealed against sentence and had turned 18 before that appeal was heard.
The Court of Appeal held that the statutory protection ceased once he became an adult. P.B. challenged that interpretation in the Supreme Court, arguing that it meant a child could lose anonymity simply by exercising a right of appeal.
Ms Justice Iseult O'Malley rejected the State's argument that section 93 plainly applied only while a defendant remained under 18. Reading the provision in the context of the Children Act as a whole, she held that proceedings commenced against a child remain the same proceedings even after the person's 18th birthday.
The court placed particular weight on section 93(5), which expressly extends the section to appeals, and on the Act's wider emphasis on rehabilitation. An interpretation under which anonymity disappeared during an appeal could also produce arbitrary differences between similarly placed young defendants because of court scheduling or other circumstances outside their control.
The Supreme Court therefore allowed P.B.'s appeal and declared that section 93 applies to his proceedings in the Central Criminal Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court notwithstanding that he reached adulthood while they were continuing.
A separate issue concerning his life sentence arose from another Supreme Court ruling delivered in P.P.'s companion case. O'Malley J. expressed provisional views favouring an opportunity for P.B. to seek a further sentence appeal, but no final order on that issue was made in this judgment.