When the Sins of the Child Point to Parents, Law’s Grip Is Tenuous

Should Steven Pfiel’s parents have seen the signs of their son’s murderous outburst?

At 7, he allegedly set fire to a motor home. As a grammar school student in suburban Chicago, he was accused of singing death chants to a classmate. After the student complained, Pfiel admitted to police that he had vandalized the student’s home with a knife and had spray-painted satanic symbols on its side. According to friends, Pfiel dropped rocks on cars from overpasses.

When he was old enough to drive, he would swerve his car in hopes of picking off small animals.

Still, when he turned 17, his birthday gift from his parents was a hunting knife with a serrated, 5-inch blade. And three weeks later, on July 12, 1993, Pfiel used the knife to murder 13-year-old Hillary Norskog, and 17 months later, while awaiting trial, Pfiel beat his brother with a bat, slit his throat and then fled with three of his father’s guns.

He is now serving a life prison sentence in Illinois, having pleaded guilty to both murders. And Pfiel’s parents, a business executive and a stay-at-home mother who volunteered at his school, are facing a lawsuit from Norskog’s mother.

“There are a whole lot of parents out there who act as if being a parent is just their right and it doesn’t come with responsibilities,” says Donald Pasulka, the Chicago attorney who brought the suit on behalf of Norskog’s family.

“We sometimes view the parents as victims,” Pasulka said. “When they see the school shootings in Arkansas and Littleton [Colo.] and Kentucky, people are starting to wake up and say, ‘Wait a minute: If you’re not going to control your children, we’re going to start controlling them--and you.’ ”

Across the country, 25 states have extended some form of legal sanctions against parents whose children commit crimes, although rarely have they been invoked for major crimes.

Los Angeles County has prosecuted 40 parents for not sending their children to school under California’s 11-year-old parental responsibility law, one of the toughest in the nation. An Oregon woman got a hefty fine under a local ordinance when her son was repeatedly arrested for tobacco, marijuana and curfew violations. In Michigan, a pizza baker was ordered to pay a $300 fine for overlooking the fact that his son had in his bedroom property from a string of burglaries.

Increasing Cases in Civil Courts

Increasingly, parents are also being held accountable in civil courts for the wrongdoing of their offspring. The National Center for Victims of Crime has tracked as many as 100 cases in the past decade in which parents like the Pfiels have been sued for negligent care. And the volume is rising sharply, said staff attorney Lisa Ferguson.

Parents of school shooters in Jonesboro, Ark., West Paducah, Ky., and Moses Lake, Wash., all face substantial lawsuits from families of the victims--alleging they should have done more to control their children.

And President Clinton, as part of a package of proposals unveiled last week, called for making it a felony for parents to knowingly or recklessly allow children to use guns to commit crimes. Illinois last week became the 17th state to pass similar legislation.

Yet drawing a firm connection between what children do and what their parents could have done to stop it remains difficult and constitutionally problematic, say lawyers and almost any parent who has tried to tell a teenager: “Don’t.”

In the case of the recent high school shootings in Littleton that left 13 innocent victims dead, authorities have said they are looking at a diary, bomb-making equipment and part of a shotgun found in the home of one of the two teenage assailants, 18-year-old Eric Harris, to help determine whether the parents should face criminal charges.

“Parents of children in most states are subject to civil liability when they fail to exercise appropriate control over their children and their children cause harm. But in terms of criminal law, current legal principles provide significant obstacles to any significant prosecution of the parents, and I think for good reason,” said Peter Arenella, professor of criminal law at UCLA.

“In this country, we believe that people should only be held accountable for their own criminal acts or the criminal acts of others they’ve encouraged. Clearly, you have here at best parents who were aware of the fact that their children had access to weapons. That doesn’t mean they were aware of the possibility that their children would engage in such horrendous acts, much less that they encouraged them,” Arenella said.

Tom Higgins, head of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s juvenile division, suggests that in balancing a child’s right to some measure of privacy and a parent’s oversight responsibilities, the principle of probable cause ought to play a role.

“I don’t go searching through my kids’ bedroom,” Higgins said. “They have drawers, they have boxes. I occasionally go in there to tell them to pick their stuff up off the floor, or wake them up when the alarm goes off. But I don’t search my kids’ room. So, ‘should have known’ needs to be prefaced with, is there something in their behavior that should have prompted them to search their kid’s room?

“And let’s just suppose they knew. And let’s suppose they said, ‘I’m taking that stuff out of your room, and I’m destroying it or I’m calling the cops, make your choice.’ If they made the effort, and the kid [responded with] some expletive, what does a parent do? If there were reasonable efforts made and they failed, then I don’t think they would fall under a parental accountability law.”

Liability Laws Have Proliferated

Most states have had statutes on contributing to the delinquency of a minor since the 1950s and 1960s. Occasionally, they are brushed off to prosecute a pimp or an adult who serves alcohol to a minor.

But, experts say, specific parental liability laws have proliferated amid a surge in youth crime that has scared Americans and prompted a search for what--or who--is to blame. In pressing their cases, lawmakers and attorneys frequently draw on the argument that, along with their rights to raise children free of government meddling, parents bear the responsibility to provide adequate oversight.

In 1988, California amended its statute to target parents who do not “exercise reasonable care, supervision, protection and control” over their children. Penalties can include a year in jail and a $2,500 fine.

Although similar laws have been attacked as unconstitutionally vague, the California Supreme Court upheld the law in 1993, overruling lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union who said it was “unfair to blame poor parents for something that is a failure of our society as a whole.”

Since then, the revised California law has been used sporadically: against parents who served alcohol to a juvenile who then went out and injured someone in an automobile accident, for example, or parents who left a gun in the house unlocked. Its primary target in Los Angeles has been parents of elementary school children who are chronically absent from school.

In recent years, parents of 40,000 truant children have been threatened with prosecution under the law. Only about 40 have had criminal charges filed--the longest jail term was nine months--because most parents opt to send their children to school instead, Higgins said, adding that “in fact, our goal is not court but to turn the behavior around.”

Oregon, Louisiana, Alabama, Wyoming and Hawaii all adopted laws in recent years threatening parents with fines or prison for negligent parenting, although some have been struck down in the courts. An Oklahoma law requires parents to complete community service or pay a fine of up to $2,000 if their child possesses a firearm at school. Florida requires parents to pay the cost of their child’s criminal prosecution, and in Tennessee, parents must pay the cost of medical exams, treatment and pretrial placement of their children.

Citations Drop After Supervision Ordinance

Silverton, Ore., whose 1995 parental supervision ordinance became a model for the state law, has seen its citations under the law go down from 14 the first year to two last year. There has been a 35% reduction in overall juvenile crime during the same period, said Police Chief Rick Lewis. “So the word has gotten out. The parents understand what their role is in their kids’ lives.”

Most of the crimes prosecuted in Silverton involve relatively minor infractions, like marijuana possession and alcohol offenses. Criminal charges against parents in a case like Littleton have been rare or nonexistent, most legal experts said, because of the difficulty in proving criminal recklessness: that a parent knew there was a substantial risk the child was going to commit a crime but did nothing to prevent it.

“A criminal charge is kind of like a cake recipe. We have to have a number of elements that go into it, and if we don’t have them all, we don’t have a crime,” said John Knodell, prosecuting attorney in Grant County, Wash. “We’ve got to show that the parents were more than oblivious, that they actually knew that what they were doing was causing the problem.”

Knodell is familiar with what it takes to charge a parent with such a crime because he strongly considered charging the parents of Barry Loukaitis, a 14-year-old who, wearing a black trench coat to hide two handguns and a deer rifle, fatally shot two students and a teacher at a Moses Lake junior high school in 1996.

His mother, JoAnn Phillips, admitted in testimony at his criminal trial that a month before the killings she told her son that she was going to tie up her ex-husband and his girlfriend and shoot herself as they watched.

Barry, she said, a former straight-A student, had been listening to her talk about her marital problems for years but became worried and depressed after she told him of her plan to kill herself.

‘Testified That They Were Lousy Parents’

Phillips also admitted that she had helped her son buy the trench coat and that she had taken him target shooting not long before the high school attack, Knodell said. Indeed, at least one of the guns used in the shooting had been left in the back of the father’s car, he said.

“They both testified that they were lousy parents, their lousy parenting was what led Barry to snap and become delusional or aggressive. Dad was absent most of the time,” Knodell said. But neither parent had the requisite mental state to support criminal charges, he said.

“It had to be more than simple negligence, it had to be criminal recklessness,” he said. “There’s a difference between moral culpability and legal culpability.”

Lawyers in civil cases need only prove negligence and by a lesser standard than the proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” required in criminal cases.

A Chicago-area family won a $300,000 settlement from the well-to-do parents of 16-year-old David Biro, who broke into a townhome in an affluent suburb and murdered a man and his pregnant wife in 1990. Attorney John Corbett introduced evidence that Biro had previously shot his BB gun out of his bedroom window at passers-by, injuring at least two, and had tried to poison his family by pouring wood alcohol into their milk.

A search of the boy’s room, according to evidence introduced at trial, turned up two guns, a set of handcuffs, a bag of burglary tools and a bounty of satanic writings.

“I don’t think they ever went into his room,” Corbett said of the parents. “They were pretty much oblivious.”

A judge in Kentucky last week refused to dismiss a case filed against the parents of Michael Carneal, who pleaded guilty in the shooting deaths of three fellow middle school students in West Paducah in 1997.

“People are appreciating the fact that if they’re going to stop the violence in the schools, it’s going to have to start someplace, and the home is the best place to do that,” said Michael Breen, the attorney representing parents of the victims. “What better way to get Mom and Dad to start taking care of what’s going on at home than to start putting them in jail?”

“The analogy is of a vicious dog,” added Bobby McDaniel, who is suing the parents of 12-year-old Andrew Golden and 14-year-old Mitchell Johnson on behalf of three of the five students killed at a Jonesboro, Ark., middle school last year. “An owner of a dog is liable for harm inflicted by the dog if the owner knew, or should have known, the dog would do it.

“I believe the law takes the position that a parent cannot say, ‘I didn’t see this problem, I had no idea, I didn’t realize, I looked but I didn’t see, I listened but I didn’t hear.’ The parent must have the responsibility to know, appreciate and understand what their child is doing.”

But Michael Borders, the Chicago lawyer defending the Pfeils in a case set to go to trial in October, said it is too easy to “flyspeck” a family’s history and come out with a pronouncement that “you should have known.”

“Everybody is all too quick to judge parents after something like this,” said Borders, who dismisses virtually all of the charges alleged in the Norskog lawsuit as “rumor and innuendo without a shred of evidence.”

‘Children Have Their Own Minds’

Parents who have never experienced this with their own children “can’t appreciate that children have their own minds, make their own decisions, not only on the basis of what they learn at home but from society, that teenagers are notorious for not sharing with their parents what they want to hide,” Borders added. “It’s a tragedy, but it’s not going to be cured by dragging a bunch of parents into court.”

Indeed, some people caution, holding parents liable for their children’s crimes could have the result of further fracturing troubled families.

“If parents feel they’re going to get prosecuted because their children are planning something or hiding something, and that leads to parents being more intrusive in terms of checking out the children’s bureau drawers and their computer and stuff like that, what’s that going to do to parent-child trust issues?” asked Howard Davidson, director of the American Bar Assn.’s Center on Children and the Law. “Do we want to promote parents being snoops and informers against their kids?”

*

Murphy reported from Seattle and Healy from Washington.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Where Parents Are Liable

Some states have enacted parental responsibility laws, making parents liable for their children’s crimes. Many states now require parents to pay for their child’s delinquent acts either monetarily or through community service.

Pay costs for institutional procedures:

Alabama

Arizona

Arkansas

California

Colorado

Connecticut

D.C.

Florida

Hawaii

Idaho

Illinois

Indiana

Kansas

Maine

Maryland

Missouri

Montana

Nevada

New Jersey

New Mexico

North Carolina

Oklahoma

Tennessee

Texas

Utah

Virginia

Receive sanctions

Alabama

Alaska

Arizona

Arkansas

California

Colorado

Delaware

Florida

Hawaii

Idaho

Louisiana

Maryland

Michigan

Missouri

Nevada

New Hampshire

New Jersey

Ohio

Oklahoma

Oregon

Pennsylvania

Tennessee

Texas

West Virginia

Wyoming

Participate in treatment*

Arizona

Arkansas

Colorado

D.C.

Florida

Georgia

Hawaii

Idaho

Indiana

Kansas

Kentucky

Louisiana

Maine

Missouri

Montana

Nevada

New Jersey

New Mexico

North Carolina

North Dakota

Oregon

Pennsylvania

Tennessee

Texas

Attend hearing, proceeding

California

Colorado

D.C.

Kansas

Massachusetts

Michigan

Pennsylvania

Texas

Utah

Washington

* Includes training and probation

Source: National Conference of State Legislatures