Britain’s youngest knife murderers, who killed a 19-year-old man with a machete when they were 12, have had their sentences increased to a 10-year-minimum prison term at the court of appeal.
The two boys, now 13, were initially given life sentences with minimum terms of eight and a half years for the murder of Shawn Seesahai in Wolverhampton in November 2023.
They are believed to be the youngest defendants convicted of murder in the UK since Robert Thompson and Jon Venables were found guilty in 1993 of killing two-year-old James Bulger when they were 10 years old.
Seesahai was stabbed through the heart and lungs and sustained a skull fracture when he was attacked during a dispute over a bench on playing fields in East Park in Wolverhampton.
The boys’ trial heard Seesahai was punched, kicked, stamped on and “chopped” at with a machete, and one of the wounds almost passed through his body.
Lord Justice Davis, sitting with Mr Justice Bennathan and Judge Dean KC, said: “We have, with some reluctance and sadness, come to the conclusion that the minimum terms imposed by Mrs Justice Tipples were unduly lenient.”
He added that it was “an enormously difficult sentencing exercise”, for a case “without parallel in recent times”.
Seesahai’s family, who live in Anguilla, a British overseas territory in the Caribbean, said that “justice has been served” and the increased sentence “better reflects the gravity of the actions that took him from us and acknowledges the immense loss we live with every day”.
They said: “Shawn’s life was taken in a brutal and senseless act of violence. He was attacked with a weapon carried with clear intent, leaving us devastated and haunted by the thought of what he endured.”
Both of the boys, who cannot be named for legal reasons, pleaded not guilty to murder and blamed the other for inflicting the fatal machete wounds. They were found guilty of murder in June.
The attorney general’s office confirmed in November it had referred the sentences to the court of appeal, claiming they were unduly lenient.
On Thursday, three senior judges ruled the minimum terms should be increased to 10 years, meaning the boys will spend nine years and 60 days behind bars when accounting for time already served.
When she sentenced the boys in September, Tipples described the attack as “horrific and shocking”, and said the pair had killed a man “starting out on his adult life with everything to live for”.
She said the murder was aggravated by the fact it was an attack involving two offenders, while mitigating factors included the fact it was a “spur-of-the-moment attack” and was not premeditated, as well as the defendants’ age.
She previously ruled the boys should be protected by anonymity orders after their conviction, saying their welfare outweighed the wider public interest in open justice and unrestricted reporting.
A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said: “This was a deeply distressing case. Shawn Seesahai was only 19 years old and had his whole life ahead of him but was brutally murdered over a minor disagreement.
“Knife crime is a scourge, and we welcome the court of appeal’s decision to increase the sentences of Shawn’s murderers following the referral by the solicitor general.”
