Tolkien in Lord of the Rings put it nicely. I've got swiss cheese for memory, so I'll paraphrase.

Some who live, deserve to die, but some who died, deserved to live. Who are you to question which?

The Karla Homolka thing is something that either didn't really reached the UK, or else I just missed it, but we have our own in the person of Myra Hindley, found guilty with her boyfriend Ian Brady, of enticing youngsters into a car, asaulting, abusing and murdering them, dumping their bodies on Saddleworth moor in the 60's. She insists that she has changed, and that she can function in a normal society. Ian has been committed indefinately, she is continually refused parole and is in solitary for her own safety. They were sentenced after the abolition of capital punishment here, over 30 years ago. There is a danger with these long term prisoners to forget the horrors of their crimes, compared with those that happen now. What difference 6 or 7 compared with 21 at Dunblane, or the Ted Bundy/Peter Sutcliffe/Fred & Mary West scores? I was born at the time the Moors murders happened, and so didn't really know what they were about. To 'celebrate' some anniversary, or to coincide with her latest parole request, they had a documentary on TV which basically told the whole lot from start to finish, including her 'return' to the moors to attempt to identify possible burial sites because the police never did find all the bodies. Telling it again, makes people like me, the younger ones who only see a person in prison against their will, think again, about why they are there in the first place. The phrase 'throw away the key' is going round my head, and I suspect a lot of others feel the same way.

LTS