I think you have to consider the purpose of punishment before you can decide whether the punishment was appropriate. As far as I can see there are basically three reasons to punish someone who has committed a crime.
1) To prevent others from doing the same thing
2) To prevent the criminal from repeating his/her crime
3) To provide any aggrieved parties and society at large with a sense of satisfaction ( call it vengeance if you like), so that they don’t resort to vigilantism.
In the cases we are discussing here a parent has withheld treatment from a child not out of malice, but because, however misguided, they felt it was the best course of action for the child.
Preventing others from doing the same thing may be very difficult. These are religious fanatics and as recent history shows, religious fanatics are capable of going to great extremes in an effort to follow their beliefs. Publicizing these cases and highlighting a good outcome when traditional medical treatments are provided may change the minds of some of these people but most will remain unmoved.
It seems that if we want to address reason No.2 for invoking punishment the best way to do that is through some sort of re-education of the individual and perhaps some method of preventing further efforts by the criminal to ever again be in charge of a child’s care.
Providing society with a sense of satisfaction to quench their outrage may serve a purpose, but I don’t see this as an issue that will result in riots or violence if the perpetrators aren’t punished severely. As horrible as these events are I think most people have a degree of compassion for the family’s loss.
I think there does need to be jail time for these individuals combined with re-education and monitoring after they are released, but as much as I despise what these parents did, I don’t think long term incarceration ( such as for 1st degree murder) or more severe punishments would serve any purpose.
