A Mother’s Best Judgment

Until very recently, Michiko Kamiyama was a criminal. It came as a big surprise to her.

Her crime was leaving her 8-year-old daughter, Julie Ann, alone at 9 o’clock one night while she went to work. Actually, Julie Ann was unattended only about 30 minutes because police, responding to a neighbor’s 911 call, entered the Kamiyama house through a window and then kicked in the girl’s bedroom door when they heard her crying. The officers promptly took Julie Ann to the Orangewood Children’s Home, leaving Michiko Kamiyama a note of explanation.

Kamiyama, a widow, eventually went to trial on a misdemeanor child-abuse charge, specifically for inflicting “unjustifiable mental suffering” on her daughter. A Municipal Court jury convicted her, but a state appeals court in Santa Ana overturned the verdict last month.

Turns out Kamiyama isn’t a criminal, after all.

No better proof exists as to why this kind of case shouldn’t have gone to court than the three-judge panel’s split decision. Replete with personal sniping, differing legal interpretations and divergent world views, these three intelligent adults sound more like talk show combatants than arbiters of law.

Which is what this case lends itself to: a seminar on proper parenting, not criminality.

First, the dissent of Justice Sheila Prell Sonenshine, who, unlike her colleagues, was a family-practice lawyer. She argues for criminality because Kamiyama didn’t tell Julie Ann where she was going, how she could be reached or what to do in an emergency. Kamiyama also instructed her daughter--depicted by the evidence as a well-behaved and above-average student--not to answer the door for anyone or to use the phone. Sonenshine says Julie Ann, who threw a tantrum before her mother went to work, was “nearly hysterical” when officers found her.

To Sonenshine, that’s unquestionably a crime. To me, it’s questionable parenting.

Cases like this are proliferating. I’ve written before about local government substituting its judgment about parenting. It starts from the proper premise that many parents are guilty of various forms of child abuse and that young children can’t protect themselves.

Nobody argues with that. But then a case like this comes along, and well-intentioned zeal replaces a sense of proportion. Doubting that many parents do what Kamiyama did, Sonenshine says, “but if [they do], all the more reason to enforce the statute.”

The justice says Julie Ann was hysterical but doesn’t address the possibility that her hysteria was caused by hearing the police in the house and then watching as they kicked in her bedroom door. That would make me hysterical. Testimony in the case, according to the other two justices, indicated that Julie Ann had stopped crying after her mother left.

Justice Thomas F. Crosby Jr. wrote the opinion for the two-judge majority. “We reject the notion,” he wrote, “that merely causing a normal 8-year-old child to feel alone and afraid, when left in the confines of her own home, is sufficient to support the drastic remedy of criminal prosecution. . . . Latchkey children, often alone, lonely and afraid, are an unfortunate reality of modern urban life.”

Some of what Crosby wrote, though, left me cold and questioning his powers of analogy: “Parents must inflict mental suffering on their children at times. It is part of parenting and part of growing up: I know you are afraid, but this is the first day of kindergarten and you must attend. No, you may not have seconds on the ice cream because you did not finish your asparagus. You may not watch TV until your homework is completed. . . . “

I wouldn’t equate those parental dictates to leaving a child alone at 9 at night, but I accept his point about certain parental prerogatives.

For me, cases like this boil down to a philosophical question: In a free society, what threshold must be crossed before we can legitimately send someone to jail or exact a significant fine?

For starters, a person should at least be aware they’re committing a crime.

Parents know what sexual abuse is. They know scalding a child in the tub is a crime. They know at some level that not feeding their child for two days isn’t proper parental prerogative.

Is it asking too much that parents at least know that leaving a child home for a few hours at night can land them in jail for three months, as it did Kamiyama? Should they have to guess whether a parental decision, even a poor one, is a criminal act?

The justices’ opinions perfectly illustrate the point. Two justices who presumably know the law and don’t countenance child abuse don’t think Kamiyama committed a crime. Why should we have expected any more from her?

Sonenshine found her colleague’s reversal of the conviction “appalling and arrogant.” Good choice of words, but I’d use them to describe a system that sent Michiko Kamiyama to jail and Julie Ann to Orangewood in the middle of the night.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail todana.parsons@latimes.com