The reason to bring any of this up is Lolita Stepney. The mess she is in, the crime she is alleged to have committed, both fascinates and saddens me. Think about it too long, it makes you want to retch.

What do you give her, if you're her judge and they find her guilty, for delivering a baby, cutting the cord and promptly using a shovel and her bare hands for a hole in which to bury the crying infant?

They've got her charged with first-degree murder. She could get life, which when you're only 18 like Lolita Stepney, is an eternity.

What is fair? What should be the punishment for child-killing? How much is a child's life worth?

This is the question we should be asking because over the past few weeks, babies and toddlers are dying at their parents' hands at a startling rate. Maybe you, too, have noticed. Four adults this week, alone, made the papers for killing their kids or their grandchildren. I may have missed one or two others.

It is all sick stuff. Christine Leonore Roman, 51, of Wheat Ridge, on Tuesday got 10 years for starving her 8-year-old grandson to death. She just didn't feed him.

The boy was skin and bones when authorities found him. She'd, too, called him "stupid" and "idiot," all the while refusing to feed him.

When the cops searched her house, they found notes from the boy to his grandmother, begging to be fed. In one, he asked to be freed. He'd alternately sign the notes "Stupid Gabriel" and "Idiot Gabriel."

Ten years.

A different judge believes four years is enough for 23-year-old Johnnie Ray Cooper, convicted of killing his 6-month-old daughter two years ago. At the hospital, they found she had five broken ribs, a badly bruised head and a ruptured spleen. She bled to death inside herself. Four years.

And then there is Renee Polreis, who went back to court Tuesday, three years after she was sentenced to 22 years in prison for killing her 2-year-old adopted son with a wooden spoon. The 47-year-old woman pleaded with a judge to reduce her sentence.

"My strongest hope would be that I could go home," she told the judge.

It was a sad tale she told the judge Tuesday. She cried. She recounted the struggles she had with the boy, from the day she brought him home to the day she killed him. She spoke of how she couldn't control him, how he'd abuse, injure and repeatedly mess himself.

And then, she did something remarkable. She blamed the boy for his brutal death.

The boy was 2 years old. He weighed 20 pounds.

More remarkably, Renee Polreis never once acknowledged the horror of what she did. Neither did she apologize for it. She "just lost it," was all she said. If the judge, when he's done pondering it, lets her "go home," that's not fair. No, it's a sin. See, these are just some of the killings. There are way too many more. Broken bones, smothering, being buried alive. No, fair has no place in any of this.

(Reprinted with permission of the Denver Rocky Mountain News.)

Bill has gained most of his journalistic experience on the west coast as a staff writer, reporter, editor and columnist. He has also been a faculty member of the University of Arizona's Editing Program for Minority Journalists within the Institute for Journalism Education. Johnson won the National Headliner Award's First Place for Columns in 1995 and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary in 1993.

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