On April 28, 2014, in Leeds, Will Cornick killed Ann Maguire. He was 15. She had taught in Leeds for four decades, and her death became one of the most closely followed criminal cases in England that year. West Yorkshire Police arrested him the same day. He was charged with murder two days later, and for six months the law kept his name out of every newspaper and broadcast in the country.
On November 3, 2014, at Leeds Crown Court, he pleaded guilty to murder. A High Court judge sentenced him that afternoon to detention during Her Majesty's pleasure, the indeterminate sentence the law fixes for anyone convicted of murder who was under 18 at the time, and set a minimum term of 20 years. The same judge then lifted the order under section 39 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 that had prevented his identification, and the boy known for half a year only as "a 15-year-old" became Will Cornick in the national press. In January 2015 the Court of Appeal dismissed his challenge to the length of the minimum term. A local safeguarding review in 2016 and a jury inquest in 2017 followed, and they did not reach quite the same view of whether anything could have been done sooner.
The sentencing judge chose to open his remarks with the victim rather than the defendant, saying that in this case there was no tension between explaining a sentence and describing the person who had been lost. The court heard from the police interviews of young people who had known her that she was someone who stayed late, who wanted every member of a class to reach what she believed they could reach, and who was regarded by some of them as closer to a friend than a figure of authority. Colleagues gave the court the same picture. The judge recorded that numerous people had spoken of how much she loved her work and how much her students loved her in return.
William Cornick was born on June 26, 1998. By the spring of 2014 he was in Year 11, his GCSE year.
What the adults around him did not see, the court found, was building over several years. As he moved through his teens he began to experience growing anger, directed above all at the woman he would kill, which the judge described as completely irrational. He spoke to some of his friends about harming her and at least one other member of staff. He later said the idea had been in his mind for three years. By Christmas 2013 his mother could see that he had a problem with her, though she did not know how far it went.
In February 2014 his hostility came into the open at a meeting at the college, where it was apparent to everyone present. He was placed on internal exclusion for disrespect and rudeness. The court treated the weeks that followed as part of a long period of premeditation: the judge found that he had decided to kill her months before he did, that the plan was formed long before the act, and that he settled on the final decision in the days immediately before April 28. On the morning itself he told a number of other students what he intended to do. Many did not take him seriously.
The killing took place in Leeds late on the morning of Monday, April 28, 2014. She died the same day. West Yorkshire Police arrested Will Cornick in Leeds that day.
He was 15, and the case at once raised the questions the law asks whenever a child is accused of the gravest crime. A psychiatrist assessed him before he was interviewed. A second teenager was arrested in connection with the events and released without charge; police said the offense for which he had been held was not murder.
On Wednesday, April 30, 2014, the Crown Prosecution Service authorized a charge of murder.
The boy appeared at Leeds Youth Court on May 1, 2014 and was remanded in custody. The next day he appeared at Leeds Crown Court by video link, on screens in the courtroom, flanked by two guards. The hearing lasted about 15 minutes. The lawyers sat without wigs and gowns, as is usual in youth proceedings. No application for bail was made, and he was remanded to youth detention. The judge listed a plea and case management hearing for July 11 and fixed a provisional trial date of November 3, 2014.
From the first hearing the court was alive to what the internet could do to the case. The judge warned that the reporting restrictions bound users of social media and bloggers as well as newspapers and broadcasters. "The consequences for individuals, I would emphasise, can be serious if there is a breach," he said.
On July 11, 2014 he appeared again at Leeds Crown Court by video link, before a packed courtroom. He spoke only to confirm his name and that he understood the proceedings. No formal plea was entered.
His counsel told the court that he accepted that he had unlawfully killed her, and that the central question for trial would be whether a partial defense was available to him. Prosecuting counsel told the court that this was not an admission of murder, but that it did "amount to an admission he's guilty of manslaughter." Expert psychiatric reports were to be prepared before trial. The judge set a further hearing for September 26, confirmed the trial date of November 3 and remanded him in custody. Both the judge and the prosecution again urged the public to take care in discussing the case online, warning of heavy penalties for naming the defendant or disclosing other details before trial.
After his arrest he was examined at length by psychiatrists and psychologists, and the sentencing judge set out their conclusions in detail. An adolescent clinical psychologist found that he experienced strong feelings of anger with little sign of them in his outward presentation, a very high disposition to anger without specific provocation, and a limited ability to manage it constructively. A consultant child and adolescent forensic psychiatrist described his anger as "premeditated and predatory," found that his actions leading up to the killing were "pre-planned, goal directed, and in full knowledge that they were wrong," and assessed him as posing an extremely high risk of serious violence.
The prosecution's leading psychiatric expert found him to be of at least average intelligence, with no evidence of any thought disorder, psychotic or other major psychiatric illness. He diagnosed an adjustment disorder, with which the defense-instructed forensic psychiatrist agreed, and found that it had affected the development of his personality at a time when he should have been maturing into an independent person. He also found evidence of a personality disorder with marked psychopathic traits and a preoccupation with homicide, and assessed the risk he presented to the public as immediate and unpredictable. The judge also read the pre-sentence report prepared by the Leeds Youth Offending Service.
The partial defense that had been raised in July did not survive this evidence. By the time of the November hearing it was the agreed position of the parties that the adjustment disorder could not affect his criminal culpability.
On November 3, 2014, the date fixed for trial, he pleaded guilty to murder at Leeds Crown Court. The case was heard by a High Court judge, and the plea and sentence were dealt with in a single day.
Because of his age, the sentence for murder was fixed by law: detention during Her Majesty's pleasure. The judge explained that this was an indeterminate sentence, in effect a life sentence, and that the only question for him was the minimum term to be served before the Parole Board could even consider release. Once that term was served, he said, there would be no guarantee of release; that would happen only if the Parole Board decided he no longer posed a danger to the public.
The starting point came from paragraph 7 of Schedule 21 to the Criminal Justice Act 2003, which sets a starting point of 12 years for anyone under 18 convicted of murder. The judge then identified seven aggravating factors. They included the extensive premeditation and planning; the fact that he had come prepared for the express purpose of killing her; the public duty she was carrying out; his choice to kill in public, in front of other young people, which the judge regarded as perhaps the gravest single factor because of the lasting harm to them; the nature of the violence; and his complete lack of remorse. On the second factor, the defense had argued that the adult starting point of 25 years, which applies to an adult who comes so prepared to commit murder, was wholly irrelevant to a defendant of 15. The judge did not accept that. It was not the applicable starting point, he said, but its length showed how severely Parliament intended such planned killings to be punished. Taken together, he found, the aggravating factors more than doubled the 12-year starting point and would, before any mitigation, have led to a minimum term of 25 years.
He then turned to three mitigating factors. The first was the guilty plea. The maximum credit available in law was about four years, one sixth of 25, but the judge held that the full reduction was not due: there were numerous witnesses, so the act itself could not sensibly have been denied, and the agreed psychiatric position left no room for a defense on the mental element. He allowed two years for the plea, which was on any view early, reducing the term to 23 years. The second was the adjustment disorder itself, which did not reduce culpability but was a condition for which neither the defendant nor his family could be blamed. The third was his youth: the judge accepted that the 12-year starting point applied to everyone under 18, and so might not fully account for an offender as young as he was. Those two factors brought the term down to 20 years.
He declined to make any further reduction for good character, which he treated as largely a function of youth, or for the effect of a long term on the defendant's family.
He then imposed detention during Her Majesty's pleasure with a minimum term of 20 years. The judge said this meant he would not be considered for release until 2034, and that whether he was released then would be a matter for others. Time spent on remand counted toward the term, and the victim surcharge applied.
Until that afternoon an order under section 39 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 had prevented any newspaper or broadcast report of the proceedings from identifying him. It did not extend to websites, blogs or social media, and he had already been named online, which was why the judges handling the case had warned more than once about breaches.
After sentence, media organizations asked the court to lift the order, arguing in a written submission presented by counsel that the seriousness of the crime justified naming him and that there was a public interest in identifying those who commit serious and detestable crimes. The judge lifted the order, and the defendant was named that evening as Will Cornick. The judge found that naming him was in the public interest. In written reasons given two days later, he pointed to the danger of isolated young people building violent fantasies online and to the deterrent value of making the outcome of this case known.
Will Cornick appealed against the minimum term. In January 2015 the Court of Appeal, Criminal Division, dismissed the appeal, and the 20-year minimum term set at Leeds stood. A High Court judge later recorded, in the inquest proceedings, that the term had been set by the sentencing judge and upheld by the Court of Appeal, and observed that the gravity of the crime was shown by the length of that term despite his youth.
The Leeds Safeguarding Children Board commissioned an independent Learning Lessons Review into how professionals had worked together to safeguard children at the college before and after the killing. It was published on or around November 8, 2016. It was not an inquiry into responsibility for the death, which the criminal case had already settled. The reviewer concluded that individuals and organizations "acted courageously, coherently and professionally in supporting the school and affected people," and that no one could have predicted or pre-empted what happened. The board's independent chair said he fully accepted the findings.
An inquest into the death had been opened and then suspended while the prosecution ran its course. On January 25, 2016 the senior coroner for West Yorkshire (Eastern Area) decided to resume it, and conduct of the inquest later passed to an assistant coroner. At that first review hearing the senior coroner also made his own order under section 39 of the 1933 Act, forbidding the naming of young witnesses to the events who had made statements.
The inquest was heard before a jury at Wakefield Coroner's Court in November 2017. On November 22, 2017 the jury returned a conclusion of unlawful killing. It found that there had been "missed opportunities to share and record problem behaviour" in the period before the killing and that overall communication leading up to the incident was "inadequate." It also found that the college's safeguarding policy had not been followed in one respect, because no formal record of concern had been made about an earlier incident involving the defendant. After the conclusion the assistant coroner said he would write to the minister responsible for digital policy to propose that social media accounts held by users aged 13 to 18 carry a named parent.
Two pieces of law shaped the outcome of this case. The first is the fixed sentence. A person convicted of murder in England who was under 18 at the time of the offense must be sentenced to detention during Her Majesty's pleasure, now His Majesty's pleasure. The judge's only discretion is the minimum term, and the release decision after that term belongs to the Parole Board. The minimum-term framework the judge applied was Schedule 21 to the Criminal Justice Act 2003, which gave him a starting point of 12 years for an offender under 18, which he then adjusted for aggravating and mitigating factors, with a reduction for a guilty plea capped at one sixth of the term he would otherwise have imposed.
The second is anonymity. A section 39 order under the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 is made at the court's discretion. In 2014 it restrained reports of the proceedings in newspapers and broadcasts, but it did not reach material published online. That gap explains both the repeated warnings from the bench about social media and the weight the media placed, at the end of the case, on the argument that the reason for secrecy had fallen away.
Whether anything could have been done before April 28, 2014 is the one question on which the formal findings diverge. The 2016 Learning Lessons Review concluded that no one could have predicted or pre-empted the killing, and the safeguarding board's chair said that outcome matched the court's view that it could not have been foreseen or prevented. The 2017 inquest jury, hearing evidence in public, found missed opportunities to share and record problem behavior and inadequate communication beforehand. Neither body attributed responsibility for the death to anyone other than Will Cornick.
The partial defense raised in July 2014 was never tried. By November the psychiatric evidence was agreed that his adjustment disorder did not affect his culpability, and he pleaded guilty to murder.
June 26, 1998: William Cornick is born.
February 2014: At a meeting at the college his hostility toward the victim becomes apparent; he is placed on internal exclusion.
April 28, 2014: The victim dies in Leeds; West Yorkshire Police arrest Will Cornick, then 15.
April 30, 2014: The Crown Prosecution Service authorizes a charge of murder.
May 1, 2014: First appearance at Leeds Youth Court; remanded in custody.
May 2, 2014: Leeds Crown Court by video link; no bail application; remanded to youth detention; trial provisionally fixed for November 3.
July 11, 2014: Leeds Crown Court; defense says he accepts he unlawfully killed her; no plea entered.
November 3, 2014: Pleads guilty to murder at Leeds Crown Court; detention during Her Majesty's pleasure, minimum term 20 years; section 39 order lifted and he is named.
January 2015: Court of Appeal, Criminal Division, dismisses his appeal against the minimum term.
January 25, 2016: Senior coroner decides to resume the inquest.
November 8, 2016: Learning Lessons Review published.
November 22, 2017: Inquest jury at Wakefield returns a conclusion of unlawful killing.
2034: Earliest year in which he may be considered for release.