Did the parents of Dimitrios Pagourtzis, who as a teenager in 2018 shot and killed 10 people at a Texas high school, bear any responsibility for his crime? Earlier this week, a jury found they owed no damages to the families of the slain. That would seem to be the end of that.
Some observers immediately pointed out that the outcome of the civil case makes criminal charges against Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos less likely. The context suggests that this result might be lamentable.
I’m not so sure. Prosecutors, I know, are as angry and sick to heart as the rest of us that these shootings never seem to stop. I’m just not sure that locking up the parents is the best fix.
The puzzle over when, if ever, parents ought to bear legal responsibility for the violence of their children has been with us for a long while. Laws holding parents liable (in civil damages) for at least some of the torts of their children go back to the nineteenth century. But criminal charges have long been the exception rather than the rule. Until recently, when a mother or father was punished at all, it was typically not for the crime the child committed, but for what amounts to bad parenting.
In a headline-grabbing 1947 case, a 14-year-old New York City boy named Frankie Rivera used a stolen .22 caliber rifle to shoot and wound three bystanders. His mother, found in a bar, was arrested. After being convicted of contributing to her son’s delinquency, she was sentenced to a year in jail.
The newspapers reported that in the wake of her conviction, a couple of dozen parents telephoned city authorities to report the suspicious activities of their own children, including a mother who “reported her son had built himself a ‘weapon.’” If the high-publicity prosecution was intended to have a deterrent effect, it seemed to work, at least in the short term. (The conviction was later reversed on technical grounds.)
‘Reasonable care’
Another case arose in 1989, when Los Angeles police arrested one Gloria Williams on charges of “failure to exercise reasonable care, supervision, protection and control” over a child after her teenage son’s alleged involvement in the rape of a 12-year-old girl. According to press reports, a search of Williams’ apartment yielded, among other items, a birthday cake decorated with the name of a gang and “photograph albums showing members of the Williams family pointing guns.” The victim told police that she had been kidnapped from the Williams back yard. The charges were later dropped, and activists pointed at the case as an example of the ways that “parental responsibility” laws would land most heavily on women and the urban nonwhite.
Nevertheless, for the past century or more, this is how it has been done. If a child commits a terrible act, in most cases the family was left alone. If the parents suffered any sort of criminal punishment, it was not for the child’s act; it was for either neglect or contributing to …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
