"The fetishisation of childhood innocence" argument doesn't hold much sway either given that half the people who have responded to me have said "they can't possibly be children; look what they did!"

Indeed. There is a plethora of evidence that the brains of children and teenagers just don't quite work like those of adults.

If you insist on not paying any attention to anything I say, then just making some other shit up and saying I should be ashamed of myself for saying it... well I don't really know how to finish that sentence because I've never had to converse with someone so incapable of a structured or reasonable argument. Suffice to…

Most adults don't do that either. And yes, I'm not claiming that they're just being stupid kids (nor is anyone else) but it is still different when a 16 year old commits a crime than when a 25 year old does.

Given how strongly people seem to feel about wanting to try kids as adults (and that seems to happen in most cases like this) and assuming that's because they share a general feeling that we're too lenient on 16-17 year olds who do terrible things, I think it could happen. And you too.

Can you keep people on the sex offenders' register if the crime was committed when they were a child? I would've thought that would be a possible exception, even if generally your criminal record was expunged.

I think revising sentencing guidelines for juvenile offenders is barely any more difficult than judging children as adults. Especially given that someone went to the trouble of setting up a system where you can try children as adults for certain crimes in the first place.

I agree it's beyond adolescent stupidity but I still think that their age is a mitigating factor (as in, if an adult got 10 years for a crime, a child would get 5 or whatever).

Where is this 6 month thing coming from? I've been trying not to follow this story too closely but I've tried to find potential punishments and I can't find any. Is this a guess based on previous cases?

"Fully aware that what they were doing was rape" isn't actually quite the same as fully understanding what rape is. Knowing what crime you're committing isn't the same as fully understanding the impact that it has on the victim. That's why kids are tried differently. It's not that they're bemused by theft or violence…

I never said they were completely mentally incompetent.

I never said the boundary was exact. But I don't see how it's any less ridiculous to draw an age boundary (which at least can potentially be grounded in scientific analysis of maturity) than it is to draw a "this crime is awful, its perpetrator must be an adult" boundary.

The evidence overwhelmingly suggests otherwise.

I don't see why it's so much easier to demand that they be tried as adults than to demand that you just fix the juvenile detention system.

Then fix your juvenile detention system, don't just arbitrarily decide that this child or that child should be tried as an adult because "children wouldn't do such things".

On what basis are you making this claim? What nature? How do you know to what extent they're making adult decisions? Sometimes people you might think of as children can still do unspeakably shitty things. That doesn't magically make them adults.

I never really understood why Americans have this crazy thing about trying kids as adults. They're kids. Try them as kids.

If you're pro-life, you think life begins at conception (probably). That means that the embryo/foetus/whatever is deserving of all the same rights as any adult. That is not at all incompatible with feminism. Yes, any pregnancy would have to be carried to term but under the "life begins at conception" rule, your desire…

There are generally far more urinals than cubicles.

What are the odds on him getting a more severe punishment than a priest who married a gay couple?