Punishment for sexually abusing a 4 month old infant

Despite taking the more challenging side, you seem to be holding it up admirably, although I'm sure it was quite a bit more stressful. Let's carry on though. The question of guilt and of comprehension is not a binary one. We know this to be true by virtue of the fact that we have superseded the original judgment in place of one of two alternatives. It is not simply a question of whether someone knows they are breaking the law, but rather whether they understand what the law is, and whether they fully grasp the weight of their actions. We would both agree that stealing a chocolate bar from a convenience store is, as an example, both unethical and illegal, but that does not mean that if we were to commit this crime, it would warrant a 40 year incarceration, nor would we infer from it that we had destroyed another person's life. Under this premise, I believe the argument for gradients of comprehension is an important one, and that if a 12 year old told you that they were doing something that they weren't supposed to, that that very admission could apply truthfully for a child who had stolen a chocolate bar as much as it could to a child who has committed an act as horrific as the one under discussion today. I admit that it is tempting to ignore the logic that we ourselves accept in every other instance of ruling on related matters when we are faced with such a grim situation, but the importance of applying the rationale and standards of law can not be understated here. We would not allow a child of 12 years old to perform any task that required any sort of depth of decision making, or judgment, because we recognize their inability to make fully informed decisions, and the lack of depth in the comprehension of the world around them. We can not now ignore this foregone conclusion, when it suits us, as tempting as it may be, because we need a monster to pay for the horrific crime that's been committed. The desire for blood and suffering to pay for brutality is an understandable one, but not always the basis for just rulings, and often the premise, themselves, for injustice. On the topic of level of comprehension for being put to death, I will not comment, as this ruling is not part of our discussion, nor is the law surrounding it. If you would like to discuss the need for punishment vs. the benefit of treatment, I would ask you what scale we might be comparing these two topics on that we could even relate them? If one could outweigh the other, then it only stands to reason that there is some sort of exchange rate where the areas could be held equally, does it not? If she were incarcerated for, say, 60 years in prison; is this equivalent to full rehabilitation and the cultivation of good mental health for the minor accused here? Would we be measuring the advantage of making this girl suffer against the benefit of healing her? Since these two options seem fundamentally at odds, I simply can not see how one might outweigh the other. The question here is not whether this 12 year old girl deserves to suffer, and we should not be fooling ourselves about what the incarceration option is put forward for either, it is purely here as a punishment option. The question we have to answer is in who we are, as a people. Are we a society that looks at a tragedy and decide that the horrendous rape of an innocent baby needs to be payed for by the blood of the perpetrator, even if this perpetrator is a mentally unstable child, or are we a society that looks at a little girl clearly afflicted by mental illness, from birth, and tries to apply what we know to be true in psychology to give them the help they so clearly need? There is no one here arguing today that what has happened is not a tragedy, the question is, from here, do we try to stop the progression of this tragedy, or pay for it with suffering, because we can not do both.