The Ribnikar verdict and the limits of parental liability

A few days ago I was standing in a queue at the bank when the man ahead of me said, loudly, as if addressing the whole counter, “Well, someone has to answer for it.” He did not specify who. He did not have to. We all knew what he meant, because for three years running, when someone in Serbia says “someone has to answer,” they mean the same court corridor and the same case. They mean Ribnikar.

The trouble with that sentence is not the feeling behind it. The feeling is legitimate and humanly understandable. The trouble is that it is spoken as though responsibility were a single, divisible thing, like a loaf of bread, that simply needs to be cut into the right slices. The verdict handed down on June 18 shows how much more complicated the matter is, and how uncomfortable we are, as a society, admitting it.

Why is this case legally so rare?

Criminal law is built around the perpetrator. It asks who pulled the trigger and with what intent. Here, however, the perpetrator cannot be prosecuted because of his age. That leaves criminal-law logic without its usual centre of gravity and forces the court to shift its gaze one step back, to those who allegedly failed to prevent what happened.

This is where the hard question begins. The father was charged with failing to properly secure the weapon from the safe that the boy used to commit the crime. In the retrial the mother was acquitted of precisely that count and convicted instead of neglect and child abuse. These are two very different kinds of responsibility. One concerns a concrete, physical lapse, an unlocked weapon. The other concerns years of a relationship, an atmosphere, an upbringing, something far harder to measure with evidence.

Chief prosecutor Nenad Stefanovic left little room for nuance during the proceedings. “There are no mitigating circumstances on the side of the accused,” he said, adding that no remorse had been shown and that responsibility had been categorically denied. The defence contested the charges. The Court of Appeal had already quashed the first verdict once, noting that its reasoning was unclear and contradictory. That fact is worth remembering, because it shows that the system was not even sure with itself how to formulate this responsibility.

Punishment as an answer and punishment as a message

There is a temptation to view this trial as a weighing of pain. Ten lives on one side, a verdict on the other, to see whether the scales balance out. But a court does not judge grief; it judges an act. That is a distinction a public sphere accustomed to snap judgments finds hard to bear.

Representatives of the victims stressed during the proceedings that it matters how society will characterise the conduct and the responsibility of parents toward their children. That, it seems to me, is the heart of it. This verdict will not return a single life, and those who delivered it know as much. What it does is set a standard, a line beyond which a parent’s failure ceases to be a private misfortune and becomes a matter of criminal law. Where exactly that line falls, whether an unlocked safe is enough, whether a neglected childhood is enough, is the question that will be fought over on appeal as well.

It is worth recalling that this is still a first-instance decision, open to appeal by both sides. A final answer, if one ever comes in a form the public would consider final, will arrive later and more quietly than the headlines that accompanied the ruling.

I keep returning to that man in the bank queue. “Someone has to answer for it,” he said. He is right. He simply did not know how hard it is to translate that sentence into the language of law. And perhaps that is exactly what this case asks of us: to learn the difference between the need for someone to answer and the question of what, precisely, they are answering for. Are you sure you always draw that distinction yourself?