pregnochick just coming out in support. While I have very much sympathy for the fact that those boys had a terrible upbringing and it's awful that they were failed by not being dealt with earlier (or the parents...), in the end they made their own choices. They hung around a shopping centre for EIGHT HOURS looking for a child to take. The details of what they then did to him, slowly, cruely, while he cried and begged them to stop and let him go back to his mummy, then screamed in fear and pain, are so horrendous that I can't even think about it without crying and feeling personally so much the distress that the local people must have felt that they weren't there to stop it. What I wouldn't give to go back in time and step in. What feelings I get when I consider that could have been my baby boy. Tortured, beaten, hit, kicked, broken, killed then his tiny baby body left to be chopped up by a train.
There comes a point where a person is so damaged - irrespective of how old they are - that they need to be removed from society. Frankly, I am with the baying for their blood crowd as the person of any age - including 10 years old - who can drop to the depths of sheer evil that those two boys did no longer classify as being humans.
These are not boys who made a mistake. This isn't a joke which went too far. This isn't children who didn't know when to stop.
These were two humans who stopped being human. And there is the point that they lose their human rights.
For the sake of the Bulger family, in that poor baby's name - a baby incidentally who would now be on his way to growing up - and to allow his family to have some kind of a life themselves, if we still had capital punishment here, I'd have voted for it.
In the end, it's two lives gone, which gives the chance for the Bulgers to live theirs. That's worth it to me. They deserve it more.