> There are people who think like this. There are also people who think, "What matters more, whose fault it is or what the best way to resolve the situation is?"

You're jumping the gun. First ask yourself if both matter significantly. The answer is yes.

You speak of this as if the attribution of fault is as petty and shallow as a sibling spat. A kid was killed. Two people planned to torture and kill him and did so. You've been philosophizing and psychoanalyzing and overwhelming this forum with shovelfuls of rhetoric and somewhere along the line you seem to have forgotten that. This isn't something that fits into some neat little moral platitude that mothers teach their children so they'll stop spitting on each other in the backseat. In your efforts not to let yourself be swayed by the emotional impact of the gravity of the situation, you seem to have forgotten that the situation is indeed grave.

> (Punishing people who do bad things because it's their own fault doesn't seem to do that great a job of stopping other people from doing bad things that are their own fault. If the only concern is just retribution, then that's obviously not a problem, but *my* concern is mainly how to lower the overall number of bad things that get done.)

Irrelevant arguments. You should already know by now, as this makes at least the third time I've told you, that I don't believe deterrence or revenge are proper bases for the administration of justice. Please try to exercise more restraint when you post dissertations here. It's one thing to have a well-formed and solidly backed up position. It's another thing to throw out diversion after diversion -- not that I'm saying you intend to use diversionary tactics -- so much that I have to work to FIND your point. To be quite honest with you, the only reason I'm even working at it now instead of abandoning this thread in disgust is because this is no longer a debate about capital punishment in which I can respect both sides even if I only agree with one. This is, instead, an argument about the necessity of justice in society vs. pseudo-intellectual folly.

> That was because the judge considered that in this case the boys were not mature enough at the time to have a full consciousness of what they were doing.
>
> They probably didn't; no kid would.

Bull ca-ca. At ten years old, you know damn well that beating a two year old with a brick and putting him on train tracks to die is WRONG. Five years old? Probably. Not ten. Not well *before* ten.

> And my primary concern is safety, not punishment.

Then you should be locking them up too. You act like there is some sort of conflict of interest between the two. There is no rational reason to let these people see the light of day again. Certainly they shouldn't be seeing it after only a smidgeon of years.

> But I'll go on, not for the sake of convincing you but for the sake of helping others understand where I come from.

Right, your position was SO unclear up to now.

> I believe in doing anything possible to reduce the amount of crime in the world and to support and help those who are victims of crime. I do not believe thoughtlessly handing out punishments helps this process, nor do I believe there is evidence to show that it does.

I agree with doing all those things too. However, it is NOT the agenda of the JUSTICE system, which is, quite intuitively, to adminster JUSTICE. Reducing crime and helping victims of crime are things that should be done by other bodies. I'd even go along with saying that these two agenda items are *more important* than that of the justice system. However, administering justice is nevertheless necessary, and that's why we have a justice system to do so.

> That's one of my presuppositions, I guess. I think we're all here to help everybody; that's my interpretation of the Golden Rule. Hence the criminal justice system is here to help the convicted as well as the victims. Not necessarily to make the convicted happy or to do what the convicted wants, but yes, to help the convicted. I believe that's the fundamental duty of humanity.

It's not the ONLY duty of humanity, and I believe you are shirking other essential duties by sacrificing them to going overboard on this one.

> You seem to base quite a lot of what you believe on the idea that a murderer ceases to be human and loses all human rights from his actions. I can understand that idea, but you haven't given a source for it. Could you please humor me?

No, because I'm not going to be led off topic. I haven't said anything about that in this thread. That argument is relevant to the issue of capital punishment, but not here. Jail for life does not infringe on the right to live.

> BTW, as I understand it there will be quite sophisticated measures to monitor these two afterwards. That's where all the tax dollars are going that you were complaining about before. It might not be quite adequate in your eyes, but *more* sophisticated measures (including life in a prison) would cost more tax dollars, not less.

I was complaining about tax dollars? I don't recall doing so. In fact, I recall refuting an argument by Zarniwoop who suggested that not keeping the killers in prison for life would be easier on tax dollars. I refuted it by saying that justice is more important than cost concerns, and THEN I pointed out what you just did -- that keeping them under surveillance is still going to cost money. The only other thing I recall saying about tax money was in the capital punishment thread (NO I WILL NOT BE DISTRACTED!) where I said that given two just alternatives (such as capital punishment and life imprisonment in the case of a serial killer) then it probably makes sense to go the cheaper route. Tax money is NOT a reason to choose INjustice over justice.

> (My problem with this kind of reaction is that it kind of assumes everyone else already agrees with you, and if they don't then all it does is leave you without a defense for your own POV. If that's okay with you, well, then, fine.)

The reason it did not deserve comment is because it raises an issue I've addressed again and again and again in this thread and in the capital punishment thread. I think what annoys me more than the irrelevant diversions are these resurrections of old arguments.

> I wonder that this point keeps getting glossed over. Christ *did* die; we *did* receive mercy. If someone still has to die for her sins after Christ died for her then Christ's death was in vain. That seems self-evident to me.

You should be able to refute this yourself. Christ's death was never intended to mean that we should never suffer the consequences of our actions. I'm not going to try to illustrate the difference to you, because I don't need to. If you follow the reasoning of your "self-evident" analysis, then you must consider that ANY punishment for ANY wrongful act makes Christ's death in vain. You yourself said you favor SOME punishment for these two killers. But why? Christ died on the cross for our sins! They must therefore not be punished!

The moment you say that their actions should have any punitive consequences at all, you can't take up this particular line of reasoning anymore. And if you DO think that their actions should NOT have ANY punitive consequences, you are not just an idiot but a threat to society yourself, and I will hope and pray that you never come to be in a position of power in this world. Fortunately I credit you with more of a brain than that, but let me know if I'm overestimating you.

> We were on the subject of things that make us sick to our stomachs. Of things that go so sharply against our ingrained beliefs of right and wrong that we can hardly stand it.

No, we were not on that subject. We were on the subject of a particular attitude that makes me sick to my stomach, because I posted something to this thread that had that as its stated purpose. You chose to take issue with that particular thing. That means we STAY ON THE SUBJECT OF THIS PARTICULAR THING. If you want to start your own thread about something else, go for it. By burying it in here, you're sabotaging the power of your own rhetoric by clouding the issue with irrelevant facts. I mean, if I did this too, instead of reining you in with my every contribution to this thread, I would talk about other kinds of things that make me sick to my stomach, like brussels sprouts, and you would talk about some other vegetables that are also notorious for making people sick to their stomachs, and then I'd tell you about vegetables that don't make me sick to my stomach, and then you'd tell me something else that doesn't make you sick to your stomach, like poached eggs, but what about fried and scrambled, and oh yes those scrambled equations on Brain Food are pretty cool, and speaking of equations....

Nobody wants to wade through that stuff. Certainly not me. I bet if I deleted a post or two of yours, I'd have room for four more AGL games on my server.

> I don't appreciate that, and one of the things I've liked about Rinkworks is the relative lack of that sort of thing that goes on.

I make sure that gratuitous flame wars don't erupt, as they often do elsewhere on the Internet. However I have no intention of watering down RinkWorks with the same wishywashy mentality I was protesting about in the first place. A spade is a spade here.