No sympathy for Tom and John

Naturally, we have sympathy for Tom and John as children for what they went through, and if their sole crime had been the murder of the pedophile guard, I would understand everyone's desire to let them get away with their crime.

The fact is that Tom and John were guilty of many other murders, and most of their victims probably did nothing to deserve their fate. For example, it's mentioned that one of them murdered a man for cutting in front of him in line or being rude to him.

As far as I'm concerned, Tom and John deserved to die or to spend the rest of their lives in prison, not for killing the guard, but for the rest of their crimes. If it took killing a pedophile to have them finally put away or executed, so be it (it would be a matter of killing two, or rather three, birds with one stone that needed killing), and Father Bobby was a fool for committing perjury on their behalf. Father Bobby lied to let two dangerous murderers back on the street to kill again, and their next victims wouldn't be pedophile guards any more than their previous victims were.

In other words, the film's story the alleged moral dilemma would have been more effective if Tom and John weren't thugs and if killing the guard in revenge was the only murder they were responsible for.