Are the Parents of a Teen Murderer Guilty of Not Anticipating His Crimes?

In the fall of 2012, Justin
Robinson, 15, strangled Autumn Pasquale, 12, both of Clayton, New
Jersey, when she came over to trade BMX bike parts. He plead guilty
to aggravated manslaughter and received 17 years in
prison. But
now, writes Lisa Belkin, Autumn’s dad, Anthony Pasquale,
is filing suit against Justin’s parents (who are divorced). She
quotes Pasquale saying:

 “Parenting comes with responsibilities, and one of those
is to raise your kids right, to pay attention and know when they’re
a danger to someone else. That’s a parent’s job.”

To fail at that job is a crime, he believes. He’s recently taken
his certainty to court, suing Justin Robinson’s parents for,
essentially, being bad parents.

….In addition to his civil suit, Anthony is urging a change in
criminal law. Dubbed “Autumn’s Law,” at the moment it is just an
idea — a
Change.org petition, which currently falls 12,000
signatures short of its 20,000 goal. Its point is
simple: If parents knew they would go to jail for
their parenting, Anthony says, they would do a better
job.

Bold face mine, because: Really? Not that we don’t try to
keep our kids on the straight and narrow —99.999 percent of us
parents do—but it is obviously impossible to control our children’s
every move. What’s more, we shouldn’t want to live in a society
that requires this.

Criminalizing parents for raising law-breaking children would
not only reinforce the idea that good parents are always on top of
their kids (even in their teens), it would also enshrine
“worst-first thinking” as the law of the land: If parents aren’t
constantly imagining the worst-case scenario first—”Gee, my son
seems moody today. I hope he doesn’t stab his playdate”—they would
be guilty of not paying enough attention.

A policy like
“Autumn’s Law” should also seem ridiculous when anyone considers
brothers like David and Ted
Kaczynski. One was the Unabomber. One turned him in. If the
parents created the murderer, how did they also create his brother,
who worked as a youth counselor and then, after making the
difficult decision to turn his brother in, became an anti-death
penalty activist and eventually director of
a Tibetan Buddhist monastery?

Parents cannot program their children or predict their every
move. So while I can’t even imagine the sorrow and horror that
Autumn’s parents have gone though, I hope they do not win their
lawsuit. Parents already face enough criticism and blame for their
child-rearing. (“Why did he eat the extra cookie?” “Why is he so
scared to eat one extra cookie?”) Heaping more criticism and
blame on them will not make them parent better. It will only make
them more paranoid.

That’s not a quality most parents today are lacking.