Christopher Simmons, Europhile

Christopher Simmons was 17 when he tied up and duct-taped his neighbor, Shirley Cook, and threw her over a railroad bridge and into a river, where she drowned.

Had he been a few months older, he would have been deemed mature enough to be executed for this crime -- which although terrible, is hardly the worst crime carried out recently by a 17-year-old American youth. How much more responsible and mature would he have become in just a few more months?

The people of Missouri, through their elected representatives, were smart enough to see that a few months or a few years would not make any difference in the judgment or morality of a young man like Simmons. They wanted him to fry. Fortunately for Simmons, a majority of the Supremes care more about what the elite of Europe think than they do about what the people of the sovereign American state of Missouri think.

Simmons, if he knew what it meant, is probably more of a Europhile today than he was yesterday.