Destiny Garcia Murder

Imagine not having a safe place to come home to everyday. Now, imagine coming home everyday with the constant fear of being beaten by your own parents. For Destiny Garcia, this was a reality. Destiny Garcia killed her parents after a lifelong struggle of being both physically and sexually abused. There is much controversy over whether Destiny should be convicted of murder. Destiny Garcia should not be convicted of murder because she was being both physically and sexually abused by her parents. In the United States, each week, five parents are killed by their children. But, why do they do it? In most cases, they do it because they were being abused. Children who are raised in dysfunctional families and are alienated by their parents tend to …show more content…
John Mahoney suffered from battered child syndrome. Battered child syndrome is shown in children who are repeatedly abused, mistreated, or neglected by their parents. Most children who kill their parents suffer from battered child syndrome. A tape recording made by John Mahoney himself shows just how brutally abused John was by his own father. In the tape, Johns father, Jerry, calls his son fat and lazy. He also threatens to hurt him if he goes against his orders. John claimed that his father punched, slapped, and pushed him frequently. He also said that Jerry drank a lot and one time he hit him over the shoulder with a beer bottle and cut him with broken glass. Now, imagine this was you being abused like this by your own mother or father. What would you do? You really can’t answer that question without experiencing it yourself. You might think that you would never kill your own parents. For kids to kill their parents, means that they were pushed to their breaking point and felt there was no other way out. Although John did commit a crime by murdering another human being, he was so broken down from the constant abuse he received from his …show more content…
This is a difficult claim to prove. The “self-defense” excuse is widely used in these cases. This excuse is likely untrue most of the time. Unless they were using self-defense, kids should be convicted of murder, because murder is murder no matter what the excuse. Many people have that idea. But victims of child abuse should not be put in prison for killing their parents because although some might not have been defending themselves in the very moment they killed, they spent their whole lives, or a great portion of their lives, trying to avoid being abused by their parents. I’m not saying that kids should be allowed to kill their parents, but there is a reason behind everything. Although kids who suffer from abuse should not in their right mind kill their parents, some simply felt they had no other options and could not deal with the pain any longer. They should not be put in prison because they already dealt with huge hardships and were tortured enough in their