"Jim ~~ Please read my post 01.39PM in response to yours more carefully, & you will see I am no Defarges, but, I repeat, profoundly ambivalent"
I'm aware of that Mike - I feel exactly the same way myself and I am as much at a loss as you, the deciding factor being that these were 10 year old children when this horrific act was committed. Perhaps I over-reacted in my response, but I find this hypocritical heart-on-sleeve handwringing by people whose primary interest or knowledge of these subjects doesn't extend beyond what they can scoop up from the net and put their name to.
We are talking about childrens' lives - three of them, not one, and the sheer horror of even considering taking two 10-year-old children and stringing them up - or even lethally injecting them, is probably as low as any 'civilised' society can sink.
"until they were 18 then sentenced as adults with a complete understanding of what they had done"
Can I get this straight Smokey - they should be punished as adults for what they did as children - should all juvenile crime be treated in this way - if not, why not?
Why differentiate at all between juvenile and adult crimes if they are going to be punished as adults anyway - let's cut to the chase.
Brady and Hindley were adults; whether they were fully responsible for their actions is, thankfully, not my business to decide. As here, I am happy to leave to those whose job it is. I am not prepared to see our justice system placed in the hands of the tabloid press, or with those who throw themselves at prison vans - or with ghouls who scream for blood on threads like this - are you?
"I would like to say that I believe it to be barbaric"
With you there Eliza; you should try to get hold of John Deane Potter's 'Fatal Gallows Tree - "an account of the British habit of hanging"' (if it is still in print). It has a wonderful description of The House of Lords' successful attempt to retain capital punishment in Britain in 1956 - they managed to delay it for a further eight years.
"From the hills of darkest Britain they came; the halt, the lame, the deaf, the obscure, the senile and the forgotten - the hereditary peers of England united in their detrmination to use their medieval powers to retain a medieval institution".
It seems their counterparts have bought themselves computers and joined chat forums.
Jim Carroll
PS Mike - thank you for not pointing out that I should have written DeFarge and not LaFarge.