Little Adults on Trial: The Prosecution of Juvenile Killers in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales.

Abstract

The objective of this paper was to examine to which extent the prosecution of juvenile killers changed during the nineteenth century to correspond with the rising importance of forensic psychiatry within the English judicial system.This paper makes use of primary resources to argue that children on trial for murder were not treated more leniently towards the end of the nineteenth-century. The main results of the research conducted in this thesis were that juvenile killers in the courtroom were effectively treated like adults and were affected by the increasing importance of forensic psychiatry. The paper concludes that juvenile killers were not offered differential treatment on account of their age but were subjected to the full force of the law throughout the nineteenth-century and that this state of affairs did not change until the Juvenile Delinquency act of 1913.