Melanie Taylor, widow of Detective Constable Duncan Taylor, says in our story today she feels no resentment. A landmark study of this subject, the Roper Report, told us that young offenders tend to be repeat offenders until around the age of 30 when they stop. So it would have been in September, 2002, when a 17-year-old was led from court with a life sentence for murder after shooting two police officers in an incident on a rural property near Palmerston North. No matter how hard a youthful offender works to change his life while in prison, it does not diminish what he did. The great majority of crime in this country is committed by young people, mostly men, in their teens and 20s.

Source: New Zealand Herald July 02, 2016 17:02 UTC