If a person has reached the age of criminal consent, they ought to be treated the same before the law as everyone else; there should be no privileged exception from disclosure of any criminal’s name; no invidious inequality before the law. In like manner, it seems wrong that a criminal who has held a public office should be precluded from practising once they have served their sentence. My reasoning: One punishment for a crime, in accordance with the law, is justice enough. We have, in the case of rape and sexual assault cases, a register of convicts, with a right of access by the public. This is incongruous with the policy of withholding the identity (or of creating creating a new identity) for minors who murder, or for any juvenile whose court proceedings are not fully public. It is time to reconsider this anomaly.
