Out of the way

There is power in numbers & these petitions do help. Maybe it'll prevent another child from a violent Death & maybe it'll get greater, more appropriate Convictions for these criminals - whatever their age.

(The details of the case are particularly horrible in various different ways. It was famous when I was young, but except for the unfortunate people affected by it, the memory has been overtaken by the terrible things that happened since all over the world).

I don't generally sign petitions like this, and I won't sign the current one.

The reason is that people who call for ever-greater sentences for horrible criminals are not solving the problem. Deterrence only works up to a point - and a major reason that the death penalty has been dropped by a lot of countries is that it has been shown to the satisfaction of many people that it doesn't actually make criminals stop and think before they commit crimes. (The people who are horrified by the idea of punishment aren't important if they are not the people who are going to commit the crimes anyway).

There are cases of egregious failure in sentencing, but some of those are bad judgements which are often corrected on appeal, some of them are bad cases where an excessive response to an outrageous crime led to lots of people ending up with outrageous sentences, and some of them are cases where the pressure to find someone to blame led to the wrong person suffering a punishment for something they didn't even do - i.e. society inflicting horrendous treatment on an innocent person as a result of its demand that innocent people not suffer, which is a pretty bad outcome given the supposed goal.

Those two kids have been out of custody for ages, effectively on the run although legally having served their time (whatever that means - we could argue foreve about how long is enough or too much but I don't think we would get to any useful answers), and will spend the rest of their lives on the run from themselves.

Ten year-olds are vicious dangerous creatures, and yet it is rarely mentioned that even monsters have parents who are legally responsible for them, and a society that forcibly takes some of that responsibility from parents and makes other parts of it impossible to exercise.

The case is horrible, messy, and difficult. I don't think that stoning these young men in public (or making it possible for others to stone their house, car, their friends, and so on, which is the same but more cowardly) for something that children did 15 years ago is a particularly valuable exercise. It allows us to get all righteous and claim vengeance as a way of satisfying our own darker instincts and desires when objectively the case has nothing at all to do with us.

There is a place for violence in the world. Armies, police truncheons, boxing matches, schoolyard fights and rugby scrums can all serve a positive purpose for the participants and society at large (although they don't necessarily do so). But as far as I can tell there is not much anyone has ever gained or contributed by simple retribution. Making alternatives work is much harder, but it turns out to add something to the world we live in.