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| Jeremy Steinke |
Accused of a ghastly murder? Evidence stacked against you? Is your defense council struggling to find any redeeming qualities that humanize you? Don’t panic, there is another get-out-of-jail card to play. No, you can't call the Human Rights Act because courts have yet to recognize the human right to commit homicide. But you can try another fashionable legal device: the plea that you were abused as a child and therefore cannot be held responsible for your actions as an adult.
We might call it the abuse excuse, or perhaps - given that parents are usually blamed for the abuse - the Mother of All Mitigating Circumstances. It is a confession, not of your own sins, but the sins of somebody else from your past. You are not really seeking forgiveness, since you do not accept that anything is your fault. Instead, you demand recognition that you, too, are a victim, a ‘survivor’ in need not of punishment but of support.
And it is not just high-profile, low-life murder cases. The abuse excuse has become a staple argument, almost a fashion statement, for any public figure in need of sympathy. Why did rock musician Pete Townshend access pay-per-view child pornography websites? Because: ‘I believe that I was sexually abused between the ages of five and six and a half ... I cannot remember clearly what happened.’ Why was President Bill Clinton such a philanderer? Because, explained his wife, he was ‘scarred’ by psychological abuse at the age of four.
No doubt many of these people are telling the truth. But why should it now be so readily accepted that childhood abuse can automatically explain what happens in later life? Whereas, once it might have been thought that people would leave these childish horrors behind as they grow and learn coping mechanisms to lead a good and moral life, now the belief seems to be that there can be no escape from traumas suffered as a toddler or teenager and the pains of childhood should be inflicted on others.
What makes the abuse excuse attractive to the accused is the displacement of responsibility. Since you cannot change what was done to you in the past, how can you reasonably be blamed for whatever your childhood drives you to now? What makes the excuse resonate more widely, however, is our diminished view of the human condition. As a society, we seem to have lost faith in the capacity of individuals to overcome adversity and try to shape their destinies. A culture in which it is assumed that we are victims of forces beyond our control, where we are all experiencing diminished responsibility for our lives, provides fertile ground for the abuse excuse. No matter what happens these degrading appeals seem set to continue.
It is a syndrome that more and more attorneys are using when they explain the aberrant behaviour of the accused, telling the court why the crime was committed and indeed why the accused is expecting to get away with it. The abuse excuse gets abused itself, as seen when Jeremy Steinke tried to explain why he committed the Richardson family murders in Medicine Hat, except he wasn't the one being abused. He said it was his then-12 year old girlfriend and accomplice being abused, that she became the youngest mass murderer in Canadian history because of the treatment she received in the household. Thankfully the court rejected Steinke's defense, and rightly so, basically rebutting the abuse excuse as described by legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, a "legal invitation to vigilantism."
The abuse excuse gives us the reason an accused cannot tell right from wrong - responsibility for actions go out the door. The abuse excuse was the reason parole was a free pass for Darnell Pratt who killed in the act of stealing $12 worth of gas to fuel a stolen vehicle, scurrilously ending the life of young gas station attendant Grant DePatie by dragging him for 7 km in the undercarriage of the stolen vehicle. He continues to claim that a childhood spent in the revolving door of foster care created the Pratt that society must deal with today, problems he doesn't necessarily see in himself. His defense appeared to be holding sway as he ran amok in the parole system to be set completely free in July 2012.
The abuse excuse gives us all reason to commit a crime once we clearly make our accusations against our abusers, but since we have all been abused in someway over the course of our lives, the abuse excuse may be doing a major job abbreviating justice in present day society.
