Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, both from deeply troubled home backgrounds, killed a toddler when they were thoughtless ten-year-olds. Dr Harold Shipman, a mature and intelligent professional man, killed at least 230 elderly people, with the cold, mechanical efficiency of an SS commandant. Yet the former arouse far more revulsion in most people than the latter, some of whose patients still refuse to believe his guilt, while others suggest that he was nothing worse than an over-zealous practitioner of euthanasia. Would it be necessary to protect Shipman's identity from the wrath of the mob if the time ever came for his release? One must doubt it; his crimes arouse passions among the relatives and friends of his victims, but not more generally. The murder of the very young, robbed of just about the whole of their lives, upsets us to a special degree, but it is not just that. We are also upset by the killers: we feel it a peculiar offence against nature for children to pluck a baby off the streets and to abuse and murder it, and we feel the same about a woman who does so.

That is why the fate of Myra Hindley as well as of Thompson and Venables - whose identity, Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss ruled last Monday, must be protected after their imminent release from detention - arouses such fierce controversy. Yet who can seriously argue that Shipman, using the trust, autonomy and responsibility of a supposedly healing profession as cover for his murderous intentions, is not infinitely more culpable and more wicked?

The anger of a parent or uncle who vows to pursue such child killers to the ends of the earth is entirely understandable. Faced with crimes against ourselves and our own, we are all likely to revert, in our hearts, to Old Testament values. In some countries, even now, anyone who kills a child - even accidentally in, say, a road accident - risks being strung up from the nearest tree. It is precisely the function of the law to prevent instant and brutal revenge, to take a cooler view, to set aside the irrationalities that cause us to hate a Thompson or a Venables more than a Shipman, to admit, if you like, the New Testament values of restraint and forgiveness and its possibilities of redemption and repentance. It can do this, not because judges are wiser or better than the rest of us, but because that is what they are trained and paid to do. There is no point in them if they are carried along by the same emotions as the rest of us.

The true test of the rule of law is that it allows to the most publicly reviled person the same rights as it allows to anyone else. A penalty must be exacted, but a just penalty, one that balances the righteous and necessarily disproportionate anger of the victims (or their relatives) against fair treatment of the criminals. On this basis, the treatment of Thompson and Venables (as eventually determined by judges rather than by politicians) could hardly be fairer. They killed a child. For this, they were deprived of childhood. The suggestion - mainly in tabloid newspapers - that playing a few video games constitutes normal, even privileged, childhood and somehow compensates for spending your early pubertal years under constant supervision is simply garbage. Once the penalty is exacted, the culprits should be released, assuming that there is no likelihood of further offending. And, once they are free citizens, even murderers are entitled to the same protection as anybody else who has received serious threats against their lives. For Salman Rushdie, the state did what was necessary; so, for that matter, did the press, since no newspaper would have dreamed of disclosing his whereabouts. The same must be done for Thompson and Venables, though the suggestion that they can live normally, and thus avoid paying a further price for their crime, is again so much garbage.

This view is dictated by logic and reason and justice. And yet it is not widely accepted today. In many respects, our social instincts have regressed; we prefer the Old Testament to the New. Crime and justice, like everything else in the public world, is now subject to dramatisation, to the seemingly endless appetite for spectacle. Moses was always more of a Hollywood star than Jesus. Drama cannot thrive on cold reason; it needs love and lust, blood and guts, vendetta and vengeance, good and evil; forgiveness and redemption make poor plot lines. We admit the drama in the initial trial and conviction; after that, we leave it to judges, and to the virtues of distance and detachment. Judges, it is said, are remote from normal life, removed from the feelings of ordinary folk. That is not always true. But when it is, we should be profoundly grateful.

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