Adolescent Parricide as a Clinical and Legal Problem

Diverse Case Illustrations

The Question of Past Maltreatment

A clinical approach seeks diagnoses that suggest reasons for a homicide. A developmental approach adds a maltreatment component. The difficulty is that the search for a motive may use an erroneous single-factor model, while a host of relevant variables are usually in play.¹¹ Multiple individual and familial antecedents may be relevant in adolescent parricides, such as impulsivity, low attainment, parental psychopathology, maltreatment in the parents’ own background, impaired attachments, mood instability, or some neurobiological vulnerability. Yet, risk factors, just as with variables for criminal offending, do not necessarily produce a psychiatric disorder. While these variables may cause vulnerability in an adolescent, the reality is that the majority of documented maltreated adolescents do not commit a homicide.

Maladaptation is a complex interaction between individuals and their internal and external situations.¹² It involves cognitive, socioemotional, linguistic, representational, genetic, and neurobiological processes.¹³ This spectrum offers insights into understanding certain psychopathologies, but it lacks specificity for a future parricide. Legal issues arise in this uncertainty: is the killing an act of self-defense, is some significant degree of excuse present, or is it simply another case of juvenile homicide? BCS as a legal defense requires a specific connection to the killing. PTSD is frequently raised as the bridge. Sometimes a diagnosis of depression is offered, but the presence of depression does not as readily suggest a preceding trauma.

Three problems arise if maltreatment is relied on as the key variable: the overwhelming number of abused adolescents do not commit a parricide, PTSD does not have an inevitable outcome of violence,¹⁴ and most adolescent parricides are nonconfrontational. The hypothesis is then extended to an adolescent's belief that he or she is living in a milieu of imminent bodily harm and can survive only by carrying out a preemptive strike.

When psychiatrists follow the PTSD path, they may have left their clinical moorings and slipped into a legal stance. A clinical condition has been injected to get to a legal conclusion in an attempt to avoid a conviction for first-degree murder. A state of learned helplessness or hypervigilance related to PTSD is posed as the reason for the parricide. As noted, the adolescent may occasionally be delusional, but for the majority, an inquiry into the thinking of the adolescent and the family's interactions reveals diverse antecedents.

A reverse question may be raised as to why more maltreated adolescents do not commit parricides. Even with the false hypothesis that most abused adolescents develop PTSD, the actuality remains that they do not commit homicide. A longitudinal study of those exposed to trauma, with a follow-up extending for 15 years after first grade, found that only 8.8 percent developed PTSD.¹⁵ Similarly, a community-based study found PTSD in less than 10 percent.¹⁶ In a longitudinal study assessing multiple traumatic events, 1420 children at ages 9, 11, and 13 were followed through to 16 years of age.¹⁷ Two categories were considered: being a victim of physical abuse or being a victim of psychological abuse by a relative. The prevalence rates were 3.1 percent and 7.2 percent, respectively, with 13.0 percent and l3.5 percent having a lifetime painful recall. While two thirds of the children in the study were victims of trauma before their 16th birthdays, less than 0.5 percent developed PTSD.

Neurobiological sequelae in the developing brain as a consequence of physical or psychological maltreatment raise similar problems. Research has focused on the effects of maltreatment on the limbic-hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, with possible impact on developing brain structures.¹⁸ Studies on the developmental neurobiology of stress show underarousal in disruptive behavior disorders and low cortisol levels, whereas anxiety disorders and depression reflect an exaggeration of normal anticipatory hormonal responses. Neurobiological research should be conducted to consider the various types, severity, and duration, as well as environmental factors and resiliency of the individual. Much of the work in PTSD has focused on adult glucocorticoid alterations or corticotrophin-releasing hormone. Genetic factors may influence the stress response system and the 5-HT neurotransmitter system. The hypothesis is that early exposure to adversity contributes to emotional detachment, and subsequent difficulty in learning from punishment predisposes toward severe and persistent antisocial behavior.¹⁹ Yet, even in such research, most maltreated children do not exhibit such neurophysiological findings, perhaps because neglect encompasses multiple factors.

Adolescents have only a gradual emergence of cognitive capacities in the prefrontal cortex, which controls inhibition and emotional self-control and thus modulates risk-taking and novelty-seeking.²⁰ While these findings indicate that adolescents may be more vulnerable, they raise the general question of whether, as a class, adolescents should be assessed legally as less blameworthy than adults.²¹ Still left open is the search for particulars as to why an individual adolescent commits a parricide, whatever the neurophysiological findings.

The Analogy of BWS to BCS

BCS was developed as a legal defense by extension of the reasoning used in BWS. One role for a psychiatrist might be as an advocate for such an approach.²² However, arguing a social cause does not resolve the question of legal responsibility for acts of killing. Psychiatric explanations are often insufficient when we try to go beyond the effects of maltreatment on the interactions and mentalizations of the adolescent.

The baseline for BCS and BWS is that battering anyone is unacceptable, more so if the victim is a child or woman. If a foundation for battering has been laid, typical self-defense questions arise such as: how much time elapsed from the last beating to the homicide? How relevant to self-defense is the elapsed time? Is it necessary to believe that death or serious bodily harm is imminent? Does a reasonable belief that such harm would occur suffice? Should the rule be limited only to a proportional amount of force being used? Is it necessary that the accused not initiate the aggression? If a court allows expert psychiatric testimony, the goal is to show that the killing was either justifiable by self-defense or to raise an explanation that mitigates first-degree murder.

A defense of BCS has emerged in adolescent parricides in some jurisdictions, either by legislative enactments or appellate decisions that allow expert testimony. In Maryland, legislation allows BWS testimony but makes no reference to children. When a case of adolescent parricide arose, the court extended the statute to children without any airing of the issue.²³ The argument is that if a BCS defense is not allowed, adolescent parricides are handled like other cases of homicide.

Questions of scientific credibility give rise to Frye/Daubert hearings. When BCS was raised as a novel defense, one state supreme court simply held that clinical assessments were social science evidence and did not require such scrutiny.⁷ However, the U.S. Supreme Court in a case subsequent to Daubert, held that the test applies not just to scientific expertise, but also to technical and specialized knowledge.²⁴ Testimony is admissible only if based on sufficient facts or data, if it is the product of reliable principles and methods, and if the expert has reliably applied the scientific principles and methods to the facts of the case.

If a court allows BCS testimony, there is the inference that it has accepted the analogy to BWS. However, the analogy requires thorough exploration legally and clinically. Such an analogy is not self-evident, although appellate courts may be unquestioning as in stating, “The underpinnings of that application, we believe, have been generally accepted in the psychological and legal communities and are therefore reliable.”²³

Dilemmas in Adolescent Parricides

Adolescents who commit parricide usually have four legal options: plead guilty, plead not guilty by reason of insanity, offer an excuse to mitigate the degree of the homicide verdict, or argue that the act was justifiable as self-defense. Self-defense usually requires that the threat to life be “imminent” and that the adolescent meet a reasonable-person requirement that a force sufficient to kill the parent was needed to save his or her own life. Meeting these criteria is difficult, especially when the encounter was nonconfrontational.

Battered women were viewed as trapped because they fear more violence if they leave or are viewed as too dependent to leave. Such fears of leaving and the presence of dependency may seem similar for adolescents, yet the pattern of violence with an adolescent differs from that in BWS. In women, repetitive cycles of accumulating tension, leading to battering incidents with explosive rage and subsequent states of contrition and reuniting, are typical abusive patterns.²⁵ Outbursts against adolescents do not fit such a cycle and are less frequently fueled by alcohol.

Rather than a contrite restoration, the pattern with adolescents fits a theoretical model of an accumulated sense of humiliation and shame. The pattern witnessed in women is battering leading to PTSD with helplessness and hypervigilance. In contrast, the pattern witnessed in adolescents is an accumulation of unresolved affective components. Maltreatment, perceived as undeserved, thus elicits shame and a sense in adolescents that they are not worthy of respect.

While the hypervigilance postulated for women may occur in abused adolescents, a smoldering resentment is more likely. The calm exterior often described before and after a parental killing puzzles investigators, attorneys, and clinicians. It is as though a necessary act has been performed. Although the idea of their being killed in an undeserved beating may occur to them, adolescents generally continue to live in a state of unresolved tension with the derivatives of shame.

Flimsy and superficial plans may have been laid by the adolescent, and he may have told friends that he wanted to kill a parent. Peers rarely believe that such talk is serious, but occasionally they become accomplices because they did not report the threats. One of the more painful aspects is dealing with the parents of such accomplices who are also facing murder charges for their roles.

The lack of long-range planning by the perpetrator is striking. The adolescent may simply get in the parents’ car and drive away without any thought of where he is going. Older adolescents may think of going to another part of the country or world to start over. A common pattern is assuming that the police will think someone else committed the acts. Some believe they will receive an inheritance from the deceased parent. One adolescent who had shot his parent drove away repeating the words of Martin Luther King, “Free at last. Thank God almighty. Free at last.” To him, the act seemed a reasonable solution. Such thinking suggests a dissociation originating with responses to earlier episodes of maltreatment. It is as though the homicide is carried out by someone who is “not me.”²⁶ Adolescent parricides elicit ambivalence—sympathy for the adolescent, mixed with questions of responsibility. Is the act one of self-defense or a defiant escape from an existence in which the perpetrator was seemingly trapped?

These hypotheses often elicit the following challenge: it is all well and good for psychiatrists to offer diverse explanations for adolescent parricides, but a legal system is concerned about justice and whether there are sufficient circumstances to mitigate a murder conviction. Therefore, diverse clinical formulations are interesting, but may not be sufficient in a courtroom unless there is an explicit mental disorder. However, an attorney who has represented many battered women at trial does not see self-defense as so confining.²⁷ There are other types of defense, such as duress.²⁸ The duress argument is that continuing threats and humiliation lead the adolescent to believe that death is imminent and the only way to avoid it is to engage in behavior that, in a literal sense, violates criminal law. Duress can be seen as the reason that an adolescent ultimately overcomes his moral controls and engages in homicidal behavior.

Further, an imminent need for self-defense need not mean an immediate threat to one's life, but that one is living in a state of not knowing when his or her life may be in danger. In that sense, killing may be a reasonable act for an adolescent who lives in an uncertain state of maltreatment and feels helpless, with unremitting shame. Objectivity regarding any such defense requires a thorough forensic examination that elicits details about the adolescent's specific situation, the relative size and strength of the parties, emotional and physical disabilities, and ongoing acts and threats of violence.²⁹

Many parricides are, in part, a protest against continuing humiliation. To assert that an adolescent is a helpless creature and has lost the capacity to make choices extends the justification of impaired mental functioning beyond what can clinically be confirmed.³⁰ It is not that abused adolescents have lost the capacity to choose, but rather that they have opted to escape what they perceive as being trapped in a situation in which an abuser can periodically attack them. Emotions and mindset are crucial, since they lay the groundwork for a homicide. The focus then shifts from how bad or evil a parental abuser may have been per se to an unraveling of what developed in the emotions and thinking of the adolescent.

Adolescent parricides reveal that community intervention either has not worked or has not been available. When the endpoint is reached, the adolescent concludes that only two options are left: maintain the status quo of living in humiliation or take action. The action is not necessarily to escape immediate life-threatening harm but to stop the degradation in their lives, which they see as unending. According to their thinking, they are making a reasonable attempt at survival and no longer having to hide from humanity.³¹

Hypotheses Regarding Adolescent Parricide

Rather than PTSD's being the key element in adolescent parricide, the hypothesis is raised that shaming and its reflection on the self as good or bad are central.^32,33 The psychopathology of shame elicits humiliation in contrast to guilt.³⁴ The resultant self-assessment is that of being small and powerless.³⁵ Even trivial incidents may induce shame that the individual has trouble acknowledging. A similar disproportion has been witnessed in studies of exaggerated acts of violence by prisoners or mentally disordered offenders.³⁶ Adolescents who commit a parricide may analogize their situation to a suicide.³⁷ Disappointments in not meeting standards leave them feeling deficient with a need to deal with self-contempt. Suicide is one way out, parricide another. Initially, there may be a dysphoric state. When aversiveness shifts from the self to the abusive parent, the shift is from suicide to parricide.

In the young, shame-induced fantasies instigate vengeful states of mind.³⁸ Repeated humiliations accumulate and contribute to a need for vengeance. When the person reaches adolescence, the increase in aggression presents more options. Fantasies of revenge give an illusion of strength in contrast to helplessness.³⁹ Vindictiveness is seen as justified.⁴⁰ It is desirable for the psychiatrist to try to understand what brought matters to such a point of finality, what defenses held it in check up to that point, and how a state of vengefulness translates into action, whatever the consequences. By then, matters have progressed beyond forgiveness.

The humiliated adolescent who becomes preoccupied with vengefulness senses an option for a relief of dysphoric feelings. However, there is also a means of overcoming a state of powerlessness by a sense of power. Rather than reflecting on the consequences of an act, there is an ego-syntonic sense of achieving justice. Pursuing justice thus has a moral theme, not only that the potential victim has it coming, but that future shameful humiliations will end. The result is a compromised view of reality. The act is justified by the belief that the humiliation will not end otherwise. The adolescent feels entitled to administer not only a proportionate punishment but a final solution to the problem. The result is a failure in moral regulation.

There is also the recurrent question of why simply humiliating a parent would not suffice. The answer contains a partial explanation of why most of those who are abused do not kill. For the minority who do kill, repeated humiliations cause them to feel emotionally destroyed, left in a limbo of continued abuse and humiliation. Once the belief has become fixed that nothing will change, the need to take action becomes more compelling. Not to carry out the killing, but to do something less, leaves the individual with a sense of unrelieved shame and powerlessness and no assurance that the problem will be resolved. The solution is a breakthrough of murderous rage accompanied by a feeling of moral justification. The dehumanized abuser must be destroyed. Evaluations of these individuals after a parricide show a relative calm with a seemingly incomprehensible absence of remorse.

Conclusion

Adolescent parricides do not usually show the clinical signs and symptoms of a psychotic disorder, in contrast to adult parricidal acts. Further, the nonconfrontational nature of many adolescent parricides makes arguing self-defense difficult, although not impossible if an expanded view of being in imminent danger is allowed. A proposed alternative conceptual model stresses the relationship of enduring patterns of shame to a parricide that can fit in with a legal view of duress in response to perceived chronic humiliation. The focus then shifts to the roles of shame and rage rather than a PTSD outcome as seen in BWS.

When asked subsequent to a parricide whether they were aware of feeling shamed by a parent, most adolescents reply in terms of anger, resentment, or a feeling of injustice. Scheff and Retzinger⁴¹ noted how unacknowledged shame quickly changes into rage. In the shame-rage cycle, shame is an unconscious process that instigates violent behavior, in contrast to an overt and conscious experience of shame.⁴² The stage is set by a painful state of disgrace, feeling mocked, or feeling rejected. Better to rid the self of such ruminations by rendering the abuser powerless. To paraphrase the individual's mental state, “Even if I die in the attempt to rid myself of my abuser, it is better than continuing the status quo.” In fact, a vicarious killing of the self can be followed by long periods of incapacitation, which sabotage the person's life. In the compelling need to act, assessments of the consequences of the behavior are ignored. The incapacity to forgive the abuser, with the unresolved sense of shame and humiliation, ultimately is a response to a narcissistic wound. The injury and sense of injustice overcome moral controls and drive the parricide, a final act of narcissistic rage.