BEDFORD -- A quiet courtroom watched as the judge read out four charges of aggravated sexual battery and 15-year-old Joshua Lovell replied "No contest."

The boy signaled with his plea that he will not fight accusations that he sexually molested a 2-year-old girl and a 3-year-old girl who were being baby-sat at his house.

Judge James Updike did not make a decision Tuesday as to Lovell's guilt or innocence. He granted a request from Assistant County Prosecutor Wes Nance that the boy undergo a sex offender evaluation.

The teen's case falls into a region of law where opposing schools of thought overlap. When children are involved in crime, "we often think we really should if possible try to rehabilitate," said University of Virginia law school professor Anne Coughlin. But society also tends to believe that sex offenders are most likely to be repeat offenders.

"It's an excruciating question for the judge," Coughlin said.

Updike will consider what the outcome of Lovell's case will be at a sentencing hearing Feb. 19 in Bedford County Circuit Court.

"It's a difficult case," Nance said.

The charges carry a total maximum possible punishment of 80 years in prison -- but Nance noted that Updike could also place Lovell in programs in the juvenile justice system.

The boy had been charged with two counts of animate object sexual penetration, which were changed in the plea deal to aggravated sexual battery. A conviction on a sexual penetration charge would make adult punishment the only option.

It's not rare to see juveniles prosecuted as adults for charges related to sexual assaults, said Cyn Yamashiro, director of the Center for Juvenile Law and Policy at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

States began lowering the age at which teenagers could be prosecuted as adults in the late 1980s in reaction to a perceived surge in teenage crime. But studies have since begun to question whether punishing teenagers as adults is an effective crime deterrent.

Yamashiro referred to two recent studies in Florida that compared the progress of children convicted of identical crimes in the juvenile and adult systems. "They found that prosecuting youth as adults in fact increases recidivism," he said.

The worry is that when teenagers are placed in jails, "you're educating them to be criminals," Coughlin said.

Lovell's attorney, David Steidle, has argued that trying Lovell in adult court assumes that the teen's thought processes are the same as a mature adult's.

In court, Nance said the boy sexually touched a 2-year-old girl in 2006 while changing her diaper and a 3-year-old girl in 2007 while playing hide-and-seek with her. He told investigators he chose them as victims because he did not think they would remember what happened, the prosecutor said.

Nance said the incidents came to light when Lovell, who is home schooled, told his parents about the acts. The prosecutor declined to elaborate after the hearing as to how police became involved.