Okay, I promised myself I wouldn't do this, but there was, it turns out, a genuinely New Issue brought up by this thread; are ten-year-olds as morally culpable as adults in all situations?

I don't know how well most of you remember being ten years old; I know it was only seven years ago for me but it's already fuzzy. But it *is* true that at ten years old *some* (not all, maybe not even most; I don't know, all I can say is some, from the ones I know) children have difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality. The kids who jump out of windows not believing they'll be hurt; who throw delicate objects around not believing they'll break; who punch and kick their friends not believing they'll cause pain.

I don't mean that they really believe that real life is TV and there's a magical fairy angel who will heal all the wounds when it's over; I just mean that in the back of their minds is the feeling, not fully realized into thought (or they'd see it for the lie it is) that it's just a game and there aren't consequences.

For some people, this attitude never leaves them; many keep it (to a lesser degree) through their whole teenage years; some even keep it into their adult years; and we all indulge in it when plaed in certain situations and under certain stresses.

Now, this is not an excuse. We absolutely shouldn't excuse all crimes committed because someone was thinking of it as a game, or else nearly all criminals would not be criminals. Adults most certainly do have the responsibility to know and understand that their actions have consequences; that's one of the number one qualifications for being an adult, after all.

But the thing is children, even the best-taught children, have a hard time living in reality all of the time. It's a question of psychological and emotional maturity. Some kids are precocious; Dave probably was. I know I wasn't. I relentlessly teased my younger sister and made her cry, and even though I knew she was crying, and even though I knew that when *I* cried I was feeling pain and distress, I didn't make the mental leap that that mean *she* was in pain and distress and that I should care about that. (Not that I didn't know what her crying meant; just that in my mind I didn't really think of it that way, didn't really grasp it.)

That attitude only extended so far for me; at ten, it only extended as far as calling people names and saying half-witted insults. At five, I had no problem with shoving little kids, grabbing things away from other people, breaking or smashing things when I was upset...

Of course my parents disciplined me (or I might have turned out very differently now), but discipline is not a magic pill. Kids are not robots; you can't push the "discipline" button and switch them into Obedient Mode. Some kids are quick to respond to discipline; others are recalcitrant. Some kids take a long, long time to develop the emotional intelligence to live well in society; some extreme cases never develop the sufficient EQ, and these are the sociopaths who end up under state care.

Learning to feel and *understand* others' pain is part of growing up. Infants will slap at and hit and bite things just to see what will happen with zero thought for the consequences; that's why it's a lucky thing infants are born without adult strength and coordination. :) (Unlike some animals, which are born that way because they run mostly on instinct and never have to *learn* to attack their own kind. Humans, being the only truly intelligent animal, work differently.)

I'm betting that at the age of ten it would be unlikely for kids to be able to brutally kill a younger child that way without understanding what they were doing, but I still think it's possible. It would be up to the judge to decide in this case, since only he would know all the details through the trial. It's not our job to make armchair judgments about each specific case. (BTW, Dave, you seem to be very supportive of a judge and jury's discretion when it comes to ruling people guilty and sentencing them to death, to the point where possible misrulings are no issue at all since appeals are available (and who says that the next judge and the next jury may not have the same biases or faults as the first, particularly in cases of racial or ethnic discrimination?), but then when a judge grants a lighter sentence in this case you jump all over him and, in connection, the prevailing policy and attitude of the whole country. Of course to be completely unbiased is the ideal, but which is worse, a bias *to* execute, or a bias *not* to execute?)

When you think about it (leaving the DP as a blanket issue aside), lighter sentences based on age aren't that different from lighter sentences or acquittals based on pleas of insanity. In both cases we recognize that not everybody's view of the world is fully formed, and that it isn't always entirely that person's fault for not disciplining himself to have more empathy. (Some people haven't had time to grow that far; some people have genetic conditions that keep them from growing that far.)

Not only the various judges who put together the legal system of England but also the Founding Fathers who wrote the US Constitution decided that, the spiral of maturity being the difficult thing to measure that it is, it would be safer to create a definite cutoff age of mental (and legal) adulthood rather than require a judge to make a decision in each case. I still agree with that idea, if only because it forces people to take responsibility after a certain point and forces others to have patience with those people until that point, *both* qualities sorely lacking in the American public today. (I notice that for all the talking about people not being willing to take responsibility, there's also a *ton* of squawking about not being obligated to shoulder others' responsibilities, which means many important responsibilities simply get dropped.) But some people are pressing to get that line of adulthood pushed back to, say, seventeen or sixteen (witness the reaction to the Columbine shootings). They may have a point; I think there probably is a high enough percentage of relatively psychologically mature older teens to justify that. But then that raises the question that if they're old enough to be prosecuted as adults, why do they not have full adult rights and responsibilities? (No, this is not a "teens should have more rights" argument; this is just saying that it's not that reasonable to expect a whole social group that mostly isn't self-sufficient and hasn't dealt with real life problems very much to be *as* conscious of its powers and responsibilities as full adults are.) What's the solution? Intermediates? New categories? (Some states already have ages of "partial emancipation", fairly well-defined legally.) Sure, they might all be possible, but they'd all require a lot of work and thought and *should* be more based on sober judgment from experts familiar with each case than on the mass public hysteria after *one* well-publicized case.

And even then, moving the new age of responsibility down to ten seems kind of early. Twelve, thirteen, but ten? Then seven? Then five, four, three? Slippery slopes exist and are a dangerous thing; this case may seem relatively clear-cut, but what about others?

Remember the kindergartener who brought a gun to school and shot a girl, over here in the States? He'd probably seen guns before, on TV and in movies, or he wouldn't have known how to fire one. He probably was even familiar with the idea that you use a gun to kill people. In some way. But are you going to tell me that he could actually wrap his mind around the fact that with the gun he *actually could kill* someone, wipe them off the face of the world forever, and that he was consciously planning to do that?

Of course it's possible. But possible and likely are two different things, and that difference is what forms the basis of most legal decisions. And the hard-line attitude Dave advocates seems to suggest that we assume the answer to that question is "yes", going in, while the British legal system and, to an extent, the US legal system both start out assuming "no", when you're dealing with a kid. That's because of that old-established tradition of English law, "innocent until proven guilty", based on the idea that it's better to let a guilty (or guilti*er*) person off (or off on a lighter sentence) than to execute (or give a harsher sentence) to an innocent (or *more* innocent) person. Many legal philosophers disagreed with that; Napoleon famously did (countries that use the "guilty until proven innocent" are euphemistically said to follow Napoleonic codes; not all of them are so-called "rogue states", and many of them are in liberal anti-DP Europe); many here might disagree with that. But I agree with it, and for now, so do, I believe, the majority of the countries in the so-called Free World. It's not so much arguable; it's just a question of first principles.

Ar"as far as my opinion, I'm not familiar with the case in question, so I can't really say; but you already heard all my opinions on the DP"thur