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Juvenile Crime: Who is Responsible?
| Article
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16967 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1990 |
1,989 Words |
| Author
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Robert E. Shepherd, Jr.
Robert E. Shepherd, Jr., is professor of law at the University
of Richmond Law School in Richmond, Virginia. He is a former
chairperson of the Juvenile Justice Committee of the American
Bar Association and chairs the Commission on the Needs of
Children of the Virginia Bar Association. |
At a time when a "get tough" stance toward juvenile crime prevails, a focus of concern has been the issue of responsibility for minors' criminal actions. In one arena, this has translated into efforts to make young people more accountable for their acts by transferring the cases of young offenders from juvenile to adult courts. A second, and just as controversial, topic regarding juvenile criminal responsibility is the proposal that parents be held responsible for the crimes of their children. The consequence of this latter focus has been a curious patchwork quilt of court decisions, regulations, and statutes grouped around the issues of parental criminal responsibility for delinquent acts or truancy, parental civil liability for delinquency or noncriminal misbehavior, such as truancy, and reduction of welfare benefits, or eviction from public housing for acts committed by family juveniles.
Historically, parents were not civilly liable to victims for the intentional or negligent acts of their children unless the child was an employee or acted under the direction of the parents or there was some actual negligence on the parents' part, as where an automobile or other dangerous object was entrusted to an unlicensed or underage child and an accident resulted. Despite the inherent limitations in these common law rules, there is a growing body of court decisions that follow the American Law Institute's Restatement of Torts, Second's more liberal rule that a parent is obligated to exercises reasonable care to control his or her child if the parent has the ability to do so and knows of the necessity and opportunity to exercise that control. Thus, as a hypothetical example appended to the rule illustrates, if a parent is informed that his six-year-old child is shooting with a .22 rifle at a target on a residential street in a dangerous manner and fails to take any action prior to the injury of a pedestrian, the parent will be liable for damages to the wounded victim.
Despite the prestige of Restatement, courts have not universally embraced the rule, preferring to defer to legislators the decision to adopt such a departure from common law rule. In a Virginia case, for example, the state Supreme Court declined to hold parents responsible for failing to control their sixteen-year-old emotionally disturbed son, who committed an assault on a hotel desk clerk with a knife in the course of a rape attempt. The court was unwilling to: "impose civil liability upon parents who fail to control their minor child's criminal behavior" without legislative direction. The court also pointed to the numerous public policy issues presented by such a rule, including the possible extension of such a rule to other family relationships,
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