'only innocent kids'
Sorry Mike - aren't you being a little disingenuous yourself - I've certainly never suggested that they were innocent of anything; they killed a toddler in a most horrendous manner.
Whether they 'taunted the authorities' or not is a moot point - nothing to do with this trial is fully authenticated as far as I'm concerned; the secrecy surrounding it because of their age and the lynch-mob hysteria whipped up by the press in order to sell newspapers has made it near impossible for anybody to claim that.
"if it had occurred to them to do it a few months earlier".....
Well - that's children for you!!
My point has been all along that the law rightly treats crimes by children as crimes by children - that for me is a mark of civilised responsibility - and long may it continue to be the case. If anything, the savage responses here, ranging from 'lock 'em up for life', to 'string 'em up' only serve to underline the necessity to continue to do so if we are not going to slide back into the 'an eye for an eye' mindset.
I'm off to Kirkby to see how it fared after Thatcher's assault on the North of England - wasn't very good before she got her claws into it.
Jim Carroll