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i understand that thought - what really gets me though is this was an adult crime - this is not something that probation is going to cure and not all prisons are a cure either, but for extreme crimes sometimes extreme punishments are needed.
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I wouldn't be at all surprised if one or more of these boys is still too dangerous to be allowed out into society when they are in their forties. I don't actually think extreme punishments help the situation at all. Most important issue for me, is removing dangerous people from mainstream society and keeping them incarcerated until they have been reformed enough to pose no threat.
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It's not like: well, at 18 they magically would have "known better" but since they were only kids they didn't know the magnitude of the situation.
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It's not about them 'knowing better' or 'not knowing better'. It's about their understanding of the magnitude of their actions. It's about their understanding of the magnitude of the consequences of those actions. It's about the level of their ability to empathise with other human beings, which is undergoing a great deal of its development during those teenage years.
It's entirely possible that they could have got to eighteen and committed this crime, in which case they should be tried as an adult, because society can reasonably expect them to have fully developed the areas of the brain dealing with empathy and self restraint/censorship, by that age. Society can reasonably expect of them a level of understanding of the consequences of their actions appropriate for an adult.
They no doubt understand that what they did was wrong. They may well have some understanding of the consequences of their actions; but it is an understanding appropriate to the brain development of a teenager and that is different to the understanding which an adult has. That doesn't mean they should 'get away with it'. It does, in my view, mean that they should be treated as juveniles within that process and their punishment and/or rehabilitation should take that into account.