Sharon,

You are right about much of what you say, but many, many courts in the United States do take into consideration a lot of collateral evidence concerning the people it intends to punish when judging them. When you send perfectly sane men into combat, for instance, and the trauma they suffer during this period,which can be very exacting ang brutal, as in the case of the Missouri guerrillas, the courts and the juries will take this sort of experience into consideration when they judge them in a court of law should they break the law, despite how you might feel about it. No, they wont get off scot free, but the effects of trauma they experienced and suffered, sometimes involuntarily, will be taken into consideration and some element of mercy might be granted them by many people, and I'm fully in favor of that. You have every right to take a more draconian view of things; that's your right in a free country where all our votes and preferences count. My voice counts, too, of course.

As to the James and Youngers, especially Cole, Jesse, James and Frank: they were hunted down like wild animals for four years during the Civil War. Their friends who were captured were executed upon capture in every instance. In addition, they were wounded multiple times. What does that do to a young man, who believes in what he's fighting for, but is treated in this brutal manner. Trained psychologists will tell you that once the pressure on them is great enough, similar to if they were under continuous bombardment by artillery, sooner or later some of these men will break, psychologically, like Bloody Bill Anderson did, and begin to strike out at their enemies without any reservations at all. When these men go back to civilian life, men like this, they don't just push a button and all of a sudden they begin to act like normal civilians. It takes these men a long time to adjust; some of them never adjust. There are men today from the Vietnam War era who roam the woods in the Northwest United States, completely detached from this world and its realilty. That's what war did to them. I'm not ignoring that, but you can; that's your right.

I'm not trying to justify the James boys and Younger brothers or excuse them for their actions. But I would suggest a more open-minded judgment of them, taking into consideration their life experiences, some of which were very traumatic. And I mean TRAUMATIC! And the current ridiculous histories of the Border War that don't take PTSD into consideration when talking about the Missouri guerrillas, need to be altered to reflect what is common knowledge in psychological circles. Men in war can become extremely violent due to their voluntary or involuntary inclusion into the experiences of warfare. Cole Younger was finally released from jail short of a life sentence because, even at the turn of the last century, it was regarded by many people that he was more a product of his war experience than a deliberate killer and bandit.

Don G.

P.S. I do understand your concern and appreciate it.