Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Couple's sentence doesn't end children's suffering

How could any adults genuinely feel that their religious beliefs, some higher power, actually directed them to yank the toenails out of their children's feet? Or to withhold food from the little ones, to shock them with electrical devices, to keep them prisoners in their own home?

John and Linda Dollar will never get the opportunity to try to sell that twisted line of reasoning to a jury or to the public. The couple on Wednesday accepted a deal with the state that will ship them off to prison for a minimum of a dozen years in exchange for pleading no contest to abuse charges that could have netted them 150 years behind bars.

With the other jurisdictions that could have pressed separate charges against the nomadic couple agreeing to the arrangement, the criminal case is effectively over. All that remains is the usual debate following such high-profile plea bargains over whether the punishment was sufficient given the nature of the crimes alleged.

The easy, emotional answer is no. Any adult, no matter what his or her religious belief or theories on parenting, who tortures a child should face the harshest penalties the law can bring to bear. A 15-year sentence out of a possible 150-year term hardly seems enough.

Several factors, however, must be considered. First, mental health workers who have examined the five tortured children have told prosecutors that testifying against their foster parents in a trial would be too traumatic for the youngsters.

Even though the children would have been allowed to testify via videotape and would not have had to physically face the Dollars, the experts thought the experience would inflict more harm on the children, who already have suffered too much.

Prosecutors and law enforcement officers are also well aware of the uncertainties of a criminal trial. While it may seem to the lay person that no jury would ever acquit the Dollars, consider that the children have been described variously as brainwashed and as prisoners of war. Under examination from a defense attorney, the children could be expected, as they already have, to blame themselves for somehow provoking their parents' reprehensible behavior.

Finally, given the ages of John and Linda Dollar, 59 and 52 respectively, the couple will be into or pushing their 70s when they become eligible for release in 12 years. Who among us wants to be a 70-year-old prison inmate, especially one serving time for having abused children? Their lives for the next 12 years will mirror the horrors and fears that their children endured for so long.

The plea bargain ends only the public portion of this family tragedy. The children will suffer for the rest of their lives, and may even unknowingly pass along some of their psychological traumas to their own children. It may take several generations to truly cleanse this family of its sins.

In an eloquent statement to the court on Wednesday, Citrus sheriff's Detective Lisa Wall actually thanked the Dollars for agreeing not to put the children through the pain of a trial. She also thanked them for instilling "something of God" in the youngsters because that, ultimately, is what broke the case.

Having sworn to God that they would tell the truth, the children spoke to investigators about what had happened to them, even though it spelled doom for their foster parents.

It was a lifesaving act of courage on the children's parts that, Wall said, got them off the path of destruction that surely would have led to the death of one or more of them. "You were out of control and it became a war between you and the children to see who would win," she said.

The Dollars will spend the next 12 years trying to sort out what went so terribly wrong. Their children will struggle with that question for the rest of their lives.

[Last modified September 16, 2005, 01:35:22]