I don't believe in the death penalty for anyone, in any circumstances. I also don't believe in mandatory sentencing at all. Either you trust your judiciary to take the right decision on the basis of the detailed assessment of each individual case, or you dispense with them altogether and hand over your judicial system entirely to politicians and their agenda-driven tariffs.
Life without the possibility of parole seems like a populist sop to those who hanker after the death penalty being applied for currently non-capital offences, but offences that nevertheless stir up the frothing outrage of the media and the mob. Would I say that these kids have so crossed the line of morality that in 10, 20, or 40 years time there's absolutely no possibility that they could live law-abiding and useful lives as members of a community? No, I wouldn't say that at all. I'd say the opposite. I'd say that in a number of years time, properly assessed and with a regime aimed at rehabilitation as well as punishment and exclusion, there's every possibility (not necessarily likelihood, but it's possible) for someone to reform. Hence, a LWP tariff is counter-productive.
With these boys, only one of whom thought it such a good idea to kill someone that he actually pulled the trigger, despite the fact that there was more than one weapon in the car, to say that there's zero possibility of any of them ever being able to live normal lives is a condemnation of the Oklahoma penal system as much as it is of their supposedly incorrigible nature. There does seem to be a train of thought running through many of these crime-related threads on DP that assumes that the only thing you can expect of the penal system is to prevent offenders and the general public from ever encountering one another again. That there are two types of people, crims and non-crims and that there's no redemption whereby the latter can return to being the former have once stepped across a line. I don't buy that.