In a landmark case, a boy in Massachusetts is trying to end his father's parental rights over him. Is this the end of the family, asks Anna Mundow
On the night of Tuesday, October 13th, 1998, in the coastal town of Quincy just south of Boston, Daniel Holland broke into the home of his estranged wife, Elizabeth. He shot her eight times with his .22-calibre rifle, then bludgeoned her so severely that the gun's stock and butt finally shattered. When he had finished, he went home to his girlfriend. The following morning, Patrick Holland woke up to find his mother's dead body. He was eight years old. The child had either slept through the attack or had more likely been frozen with terror.
Daniel Holland (35) was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Patrick passed into the care of the Massachusetts Department of Social Services. Eventually his mother's best friends, Ronald and Rita Lazinsky, became his legal guardians and the boy continues to live happily with them today in Sandown, New Hampshire.
If Daniel Holland had left it at that, his son would have been just another traumatised child, albeit one fortunate enough to have been rescued early on from a foster care system that nationally shelters more than 700,000 children.
But that is not Daniel Holland's style. Two years ago, the convict began to reach out to his son from prison. He demanded access to Patrick's school reports, updates on his therapy sessions, information on his performance in school sports. He wanted, as they say, to reconnect. That was when Patrick decided to divorce his father.
"He has no business in my life," the teenager said at the time, "He hasn't seen me in six years. How does he know what's in my best interest?"
When Patrick Holland decided to speak for himself, he became not only a national news story but also the lightning rod for child rights advocates, on the one hand, and family unity campaigners on the other. One side hailed him as the ideal champion for what Youth Rights calls "the last civil rights movement", the fight for children to be granted independent legal status. Family advocates, however, regarded Patrick's petition as another blow to an already fragile American institution.
If successful, the boy would become the first child in the country - legally and independently - to terminate a parent's rights. All sides recognise Patrick Holland's case could radically alter America's sacrosanct notions of parent and child, of the family bond itself.
Not that Daniel Holland is anybody's idea of the model parent. "I don't have good memories of him," Patrick told the Boston Herald earlier this year, in a feat of understatement. Patrick recalled years of beatings, being shut in a closet for hours at a time by a father who "was usually at a bar or a friend's house" when he was not terrorising his wife and child. Patrick's mother, by contrast, "could light up a room". Elizabeth Holland was a surgical technician at Tufts Medical Centre in Boston where her colleagues also seemed to love and admire her.
Days before the killing, Holland had reportedly threatened Elizabeth, boasting "I'm going to be a headline". When Patrick found his mother's body, the child immediately said that he knew who had killed her. But Daniel Holland was more worried about what his girlfriend knew. That is why he tried to marry her. Having allegedly told Brenda Hewey that he had killed his wife, Holland later tried to make her his legal spouse in order to force prosecutors to eliminate her as a witness. "I'm willing to let the courts decide his constitutional rights," Sheriff Michael Belloti drily responded when Holland accused Belloti of violating his civil rights by preventing the marriage in prison. As it turned out, Holland needed more than a loyal new wife to shield him from a murder conviction.
HOMICIDE AND DIVORCE are nothing new to American courts. But when 14-year-old Patrick Holland asked a judge to grant him a legal divorce from his father the system went into spasm. In February, Judge Robert W. Langlois dismissed the case, saying that the Massachusetts court had no jurisdiction because Patrick was living in New Hampshire.
"Patrick's father winds up the big winner here," Ronald Lazinsky, the boy's guardian fumed. "He murders Patrick's mother, he's in prison, yet he's the winner and Patrick's the loser." Legal observers noted that a New Hampshire court would be reluctant to hear a case involving a Massachusetts prisoner and warned that an appeal in Massachusetts would be pointless because Patrick would probably be an adult by the time the case was resolved.
In an unusual move, however, the Massachusetts Department of Social Services intervened. "We knew Patrick because he was in our custody for several years after his mother died," DSS spokeswoman Denise Monteiro told the Associated Press after the court's February ruling, "We were shocked by Judge Langlois's decision." In April, however, after hearing from the DSS, Judge Langlois reversed his earlier ruling and set a date of next Tuesday, July 26th, for Norfolk Superior Court in Boston to begin hearing the historic case.
"I'm really excited that the judge is allowing it to go to trial," Patrick recently told the New York Times. "I just want to say to the world that he's not my father. Ron Lazinsky is my father." Patrick has the right to say that. But does he have the legal right to act? Under US law, according to the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University, "a child is a person and not a subperson over whom the parent has an absolute possessory interest". The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989, cites: "The right to survival. The right to develop to the fullest. The right to protection from harmful influence, abuse and exploitation. The right to participate fully in family, cultural and social life." (Only Somalia and the US, by the way, refused to ratify the convention.)
Patrick Holland is not the first youth to test such worthy principles. In 1992, 11-year-old Gregory Kingsley of Florida sued for separation from his mother, Rachel, citing neglect and abandonment. His father, reportedly a drunk, had died of a gunshot wound, perhaps self-inflicted, three months after Gregory's mother was granted custody of their three children.
Gregory, who had shuttled between estranged parents for most of his life, had finally been placed by his mother in the State's care along with his two younger brothers. "I was trying to care for the children alone on a waitress's pay," K's mother said at the time. "I never received any child support from the father. I didn't qualify for welfare. And there was a year's waiting list to get on public housing. I'm a good mother who's been dealt a crummy hand in life."
Gregory's lawyer, Jerri Blair, argued that her client had a constitutional right to have his own views presented in court instead of accepting what adults regarded as his best interests. Judge Thomas S. Kirk agreed that Gregory had the legal standing to challenge his mother's parental rights. After a two-day trial, he terminated Rachel Kingsley's legal ties to her son but a Florida state appeals court later ruled that minors cannot sue on their own to terminate a parent's rights; Judge Kirk's ruling held only because adults were litigants in the case.
More recently - and more frivolously - in May of this year, 14-year-old Peter Lonsdale of Melbourne became the first minor in Australia to divorce a parent.
Citing "irreconcilable differences" with his mother, Peter, a pupil at an exclusive private college, told reporters: "I love her heaps . . . but I don't think I could live with her for a long period. It was very challenging. I pushed Mum too far most of the time. She was pretty strict as a parent but she never did anything for the sake of hurting me. The main reason why I had to go through this was to give us both space . . . " Peter's mother testified that he repeatedly lit fires in his room, adding: "If I let Peter do everythinghe wanted this would not have happened." Thanks to the court's ruling, Peter now lives with a more understanding couple.
That, critics insist, is what may happen when the law allows a child to make his own case for separation, to act essentially as an adult. But is this such a subversive idea? Jan Dizard, co-author with Howard Gadlin of The Minimal Family, sees it as facing the facts.
"Clearly the increased autonomy of both husband and wife have made it necessary for kids to take more responsibility," he observes. "For instance, more children take charge of preparing their own meals before their parents come home." American appliance manufacturers know this; that is why they write their operating manuals for children. "It's simple. Market research showed that it was kids using them," says Dizard. He concludes that " . . . there are real virtues for recognising the right of a child to leave an unhappy household. The notion that the biological parent is the best nuturer has no basis in fact."
The National Child Rights Alliance goes further, arguing that children have the right to be heard in court as soon as they can talk. "We have had experience with children as young as three years old saying: 'I don't want to live here anymore,'" a spokeswoman recently told the New York Times. "If a child is old enough to say what he wants and doesn't want, why aren't people willing to accept that." Because he is a child? Certainly, the Victorian ideal of childhood as an innocent, protected state - hypocritical even then - seems increasingly artificial today when antidepressants are prescribed for toddlers. But what about the much celebrated family unit? In The Minimal Family, Dizard writes that " . . . a 'typical' person growing up today might well live for the first 10 years of his/her life in a conventional family and then, following the parents' divorce, live with a single parent . . . this would be followed by living alone for five years, cohabiting for a year, returning to single life. Marrying, having a child, divorcing when the child is six, returning to the parental home with the child for a year and then living as a single parent. It is a long way from the Donna Reed Show."
Family unity advocates are not the only ones troubled by Patrick Holland's case. Groups such as the American Fathers Coalition, Fathers and Familes and Dads Against Discrimination are also alarmed by what they see as another example of legal and societal bias against fathers in divorce/ custody cases.
"We believe that a father is an essential part of a child's life and that neither divorce nor separation should change that," the Fathers and Families charter reads.
In this historic battle, however, even Fathers and Families may find themselves backing the son.