I'm with Dave on this one. These kids were TEN years old. You can't tell me that at ten, you don't have some realistic concept of life and death, pain and brutality, right and wrong.

I've stayed out of these threads because I don't really hold the concept of the magical, the mystical [harp music here] *life,* in as much reverence as most, be it the victim's or the perpetrator's. But I had to step in here and defend Dave's position that capital punishment is about exactly that: punishment. Not deterring, not making an example of, not even protecting other citizens. If we've decided that taking someone's life from him is the worst we can do as a form of punishment and still live with ourselves, we're a lot more humane than I would expect.

More to the point: Do you have any idea how far two miles is to walk? How long it would take, especially "leading/dragging" a two year old? Don't you think that at some point during that long, torturous walk, *you*, in their shoes, would have realized that what you were doing, much less what you were contemplating doing, was horriffic and heinous and bound to end in that child's death? Would you, at ten, *never* consider there would be consequences to you at that point? And that's the *least* of what they did, by far.

I don't give people, on the whole -- especially when they band together for any reason -- much credit. But I give ten year olds more credit than that.

Mousie