PERSPECTIVE ON ABUSE : Are Kids Who Lash Back Culpable? : Exoneration is no answer, but neither are those who have suffered terribly deserving of the law’s harshest sanction.
Despite the psychological damage from victimization, past or present, the law holds sane adults accountable for how they choose to respond to their victimizers. But how should the law react when the victim is a child or young adolescent and the victimizer is his parent or caretaker? Is it fair to apply expectations of responsibility to the Dutton boys of Rush Springs, Okla., who shot and killed their father as he dozed on a sofa? And if their status as children requires a different measure of culpability, how should the law treat defendants whose victimization extended from childhood into adulthood, as the Menendez brothers claim?
A powerful argument can be made that children lack the experience and maturity to either understand or cope with the trauma inflicted on them when they are subjected to continuing severe abuse by their parents. Their moral immaturity as well as their complete dependency on their abusers supports the judgment that they cannot be held fully accountable for how they respond to their victimizers. Sadly, the criminal law in most states rejects the use of an immaturity defense in juvenile criminal proceedings. Young adolescents who kill their parents may be prosecuted as adults for murder and they will be treated as morally responsible actors. A few states, however, have begun to rethink how the law of self-defense should apply to abused children. Usually, children who resort to lethal force in response to continuing abuse act when there is no imminent threat of harm confronting them. In such cases, traditional self-defense doctrine does not apply, because the child is killing to prevent future harm.
The law should justify these defensive preemptive strikes when nonviolent alternatives are not readily available. After all, the law would allow someone being held for ransom to kill the kidnaper as he slept. Why should this principle not apply to abused children who are virtual hostages to their parents’ violence? It is unreasonable to expect these children to leave their home and fend for themselves. It also is unfair to blame them for their failure to alert others to their predicament. As a society, we offer such children very little assistance and even less assurance that they will not suffer their parents’ wrath later. Many abused children are left with a dire choice: continuing to submit, or killing the abusing parent. Most children submit. For the few who don’t, it should not matter that they kill when they are not in immediate danger. A few courts have begun to head in this direction.
If the criminal law were to recognize special immaturity or self-defense rules for battered children, it would have to draw a line between them and morally accountable young adults faced with the same abuse. The Menendez brothers were 18 and 21 at the time they killed their parents, which raises the question of where to draw that line when the victimization allegedly extended from childhood into adulthood.
The Dutton boys, 12 and 15, lived with their unemployed father in a trailer without heat, telephone or electricity, in rural southwestern Oklahoma. They were forbidden virtually all contact with the outside world, apart from going to school. By contrast, the Menendez brothers were not totally dependent on their parents and had access to other resources (including a therapist) to help them with their problems. Lyle no longer lived at home at the time of the killings, and Erik was about to leave for college. We could view them as young adults who did not take advantage of resources available to them but chose instead a violent solution. On the other hand, mental-health experts will probably testify that the brothers were suffering from “learned helplessness” and “post-traumatic stress” as a result of years of abuse. The purpose of this testimony will be to explain why they did not perceive or pursue nonviolent means of defending themselves.
Explanations for why victims fail to act reasonably cannot possibly justify unreasonable actions. But such testimony does raise the question of whether we can fairly expect them to have acted differently. Did the serious psychological harm that resulted from being victimized throughout childhood thwart the proper development of their moral capacities? Did they lack the capacity to make appropriate moral judgments or act in accordance with them? These are the ultimate questions that lurk beneath the Menendezes’ defense--assuming their juries believe that they were the victims of abuse.
While the law presumes that being a victim does not destroy an adult’s accountability, it does recognize that victims of terrible abuse who have been provoked to respond with lethal violence are not deserving of the law’s harshest sanction. If the Menendez juries are persuaded that the brothers were abused, and that their abuse provoked them to kill unnecessarily, a verdict for the less serious crime of voluntary manslaughter is possible.
No rule of law can adequately address the moral ambiguities that arise in cases where abused children kill their parents. The law values the jury system in part because our society prefers that a community surrogate be the ultimate arbiter when life and liberty are at stake. But the law does offer juries clear guidance about the legal and moral norms that should guide their deliberations.
It makes little moral or social sense to treat a victim who kills his abuser as deserving of the moral stigma and possible death sentence that can result from a murder conviction. But it also makes little sense to exonerate a responsible adult victim who inflicts the ultimate punishment on his abuser where, we reasonably believe, he could have acted differently.