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He was a man full of anger, and they saw him as the damaged boy he was, destroyed by a lifetime of simulations with no true moral judgment, but allowing the opportunity to be hateful and spiteful. He didn't blame the simulation, not fully, it did its job in keeping him alive. He would like to blame the circumstances, or say that none of it mattered, because none of those people were real. It would be so easy, but it wasn't true. The people weren't real, but the things he believed in still mattered.
Years later, he would come to think that he should have been treated as a war criminal, even if that particular war was over centuries before his birth, and his participation in it was just play pretend. His intentions were still evil, and so were his thoughts. As much as they told him that people couldn't be punished by intentions and thoughts of things that would never come to pass, it still didn't seem fair that he shouldn't be punished.
It wasn't fair, but they saw him as damaged rather than evil, or maybe damaged and evil. He certainly felt this way, even as his time in the simulation became a smaller fraction of his life. They gave him a chance that perhaps he didn't deserve, but they gave it to him anyway, and the hardest part of it all was looking into his past and seeing a man he could only hate and despise, a spiteful, cruel man, who had no place in the future.
Sometimes he wondered if he even had a place in the future, but after the heartbreak that he caused his adoptive parents, he couldn't hurt this set of parents by giving up, although he still wondered if he was redeemable.