[Niamh.]

Originally Posted by Ammi

..and also...I don't know if it's a good analogy but there was a thread a little while ago/a story..it was about a father who left his child in the backseat of his car in the full heat of the day and his son suffered an extremely painful death...he had forgotten that his son was there and he had forgotten to drop him off at nursery school...I remember reading about it on a few sites and there were many who showed sympathy in that, the father would have to live with what he did for the rest of his life and that's the worst punishment a parent could ever have, nothing you could do to him would be worse than what he himself had to live with....it was negligent, I don't think there's any question of that...but why so much coldness and so much unrelenting lack of compassion toward the McCanns for something that must torture them every single day...

I guess the difference is that that was an accident? He didn't purposely leave the child in the car where as the McCanns did decide to leave their children alone that night even after Maddie had told them that she'd woken the night before and had been crying when she couldn't find them?