Judges do not rage, or cry. But behind every icy line of the extraordinary statement with which Florida Judge Joel T. Lazarus upheld the laws of his state and sentenced 14-year-old Lionel Tate to life in prison without parole, there is an anger deeper than tears. Anger at the state Legislature that drafted the harsh laws making it possible for a child who was 12 at the time of his crime to be charged as an adult. Anger at the state prosecution, which refused to reduce the charge, as it was in its power to do.

And yes, anger at the unspeakable crime committed by Tate, who deliberately slammed and stomped a defenseless 6-year-old girl named Tiffany Eunick to death -- crushing her little head, smashing her tiny abdomen with such force that part of her liver was ripped off. The injuries were so horrific that the jury was not even shown every photograph of her maimed body. They didn't need to see them.

But if Lazarus rightly condemned Tate's awful crime -- and it was a crime -- he also understood and acknowledged something that somehow the Legislature, the grand jury and the state attorney's office failed to see, or didn't want to: Lionel Tate is a boy. And civilized societies do not sentence children, no matter what terrible things they have done, as adults.

So we got what we asked for. We asked for tough-on-crime legislation. We asked for mandatory minimums and inflexible charges. We asked to try juveniles as adults. We asked for more and harsher prisons. We asked, in short, to do what children do -- be allowed to lash out immediately and instinctively at wrongdoers, vent our rage and grief and fear without restraint and without guilt. We didn't want to know if it worked, if any of these measures actually reduced crime. We didn't care that studies show that the death penalty does not deter crime, or that juvenile crime has been dropping for five years in a row (and not as a result of our draconian juvenile-offender laws -- future punishment doesn't deter kids). We wanted to drink deeply of the bitter fountain of revenge. Pure, naked retribution, Old Testament-style.

Anything less, thundered the harsh prophets who are now running this country, would be "coddling." Anything less would represent moral collapse, the triumph of the degenerate, morally relativist values of the left. If the wrongdoers are kids, it makes no difference -- children must have a perfectly developed, fully adult sense of right and wrong. And if they don't, it's because of permissive parenting. That's why President Bush denounced Charles Andrew Williams, the 15-year-old who killed two classmates at Santana High School, as a "coward" and said the best way to stop such tragedies was to "teach children the difference between right and wrong." That is the language of a man whose pose of moral absolutism prevents him from understanding that childhood, with its infinite complexities and sadnesses, is a universe that can't always be described with words like "coward" and "right and wrong."

Bush used the same rhetoric to describe a horribly screwed-up teenager that presidents customarily reserve for terrorists. It's as if he was afraid that if he acknowledged that childhood might be a mitigating factor, it would open a Pandora's box of other bleeding-heart excuses. Which of course, it would. And in the age of retribution, better that childhood die than that a guilty person not suffer the full, satisfying measure of our wrath.

Which is to say: Our own need to be children is forcing us to deny the childhood of realchildren. Did someone say "moral decline"?

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