One defendant loses his anonymity as a warning to others. The other keeps hers.

The story

Metro reports that Emmanuel Avogo, 16 at the time, has been jailed for life, with a minimum term of 20 years, for the machete murder of accountant Adam Khan, 26, in Luton last August. Avogo and a 16-year-old girl, who cannot be identified, had planned together to lure Mr Khan to a meeting, after he had offered her cannabis and, the judge said, was "pestering" her for sex. The girl did not know Avogo would bring a machete. She was convicted of manslaughter and given a two-year detention and training order. Before sentencing Avogo, the judge stripped him of his anonymity as a youth defendant, after a Press Association application, as a deterrent against knife crime, noting Avogo's history of carrying knives and his continuing denial of responsibility for the killing.

The reframe

Two teenagers planned an ambush together. One is now a named adult in every report of his own sentencing, his face and history public record for as long as anyone cares to look. The other remains "the girl who cannot be identified," protected by exactly the youth-anonymity principle the court decided did not apply to her co-defendant.

The judge's stated reasoning for lifting Avogo's anonymity, that naming him serves as a deterrent to other knife carriers, is not an unreasonable use of judicial discretion on its own terms. But it is a decision about what the public interest requires, applied to one of two teenagers who together built the plan that got a man killed. The girl set up the meeting, knowing Mr Khan would arrive expecting a sexual transaction with a minor in exchange for drugs; she says she did not know a machete would appear. That distinction is legally sound; manslaughter is a different offence from murder, and her culpability is genuinely narrower than his. What it does not explain is why deterrence, once identified as a legitimate reason to override a legal protection, only reached as far as the co-defendant who actually swung the blade.

Anonymity for young offenders exists as a general principle, not a discretionary reward for better behaviour within the same crime. Once a court decides that principle can be set aside because the public interest in naming someone outweighs it, the question of why that logic stops at the second defendant's door becomes difficult to avoid. Nothing here suggests malice or inconsistency for its own sake; PA applied for one departure from the default, not two, and the court ruled on the application in front of it. But that is precisely the mechanism this book keeps returning to: the system does not usually choose who gets full exposure and who gets continued protection through a single, symmetrical rule. It chooses through whichever specific application happens to be made, against whichever specific defendant, on whichever specific day, and the aggregate pattern that produces is not something anyone actually decided.