Mother Agrees to Keep Her Daughter Leashed

All day, every day, for the next month, Deborah Harter will lead her teenage daughter around on a 2-foot chain--to school, to the store, to bed.

A judge ordered the security measure for Tonya Kline, a rebellious 15-year-old who kept getting in trouble with the law.

“I lead her around like a puppy dog,” Harter said.

The 38-year-old homemaker doesn’t particularly like it. But on Thursday, sitting next to her daughter beside the Christmas tree in their suburban Charleston house, she said it beats sending her daughter back to a detention center.

Tonya wears a belt normally used for shackling prisoners. Since Dec. 7, her mother has been required to hold on to a chain attached to the belt.

Tonya can shower and go to the bathroom alone at home, where the bathrooms have no windows. Her mother has to sleep next to her on a couch in her bedroom. Everywhere else, they are linked by the chain.

In class, her mother sits next to her or behind her.

“It’s not as bad as it seems,” Tonya said. “I think about the positives, not the negatives.”

The girl has to behave and go to school every day, though she said a migraine kept her home on Thursday. And she can’t sneak out at night.

If her daughter leaves, Harter faces 30 days in jail. Tonya said she isn’t planning an escape.

“It’s taught me a lesson,” she said. “I’m already straightened out.”

Tonya spent two months in juvenile detention awaiting sentencing on charges of truancy, shoplifting and breaking into a house with her 16-year-old brother.

At a Dec. 7 hearing before Family Court Judge Wayne Creech, the judge set sentencing for Jan. 27. When it looked like Tonya would be sent back to juvenile detention until then, her mother offered to do whatever it takes to keep her daughter home. But the judge worried that she’d run away again.

Harter was expecting the judge to order electronic monitoring.

“When he told the fellas to go get the shackles, I was kind of shocked,” she said. “I never thought of this.”

The executive director of the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, Steven Bates, said the agency objects to shackling prisoners but won’t fight this case because neither mother nor daughter wants to.

“Our concern is that it not become a routine incident,” he said.

As for Harter, she said that she and her husband, Richard, Tonya’s stepfather, never get any time alone anymore. Harter misses going out with him and spending time with friends.

“I feel like I’ve got a sentence here as well,” Harter said. As for her daughter, she said: “I just hope it works for her.”

The judge told WCIV-TV in Charleston on Wednesday that he did some checking before he imposed the punishment and found no law against it. He recently ordered the same measure for a 10th-grade boy.

Other judges barely raised an eyebrow.

“It’s obviously unusual,” said state Supreme Court Justice Ernest A. Finney Jr. “The times in which we live are different.”