Criminal Responsibility Quotes

“This basic misguided survival instinct coupled with most teens seeing the world around them through the narrow lens of their own limited experience makes it harder for them to be compassionate. In essence, teenagers are like little psychopaths. Running around, making bad decisions, without a thought of how those decisions will affect themselves or others.
Knowing this about the brain brings up interesting dilemmas when it comes to teens being tried as adults in courts of law.”
― Sascha Rothchild, Blood Sugar

“The Chair [Justice Peter McClellan, former Chair of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse] seemed to see where he was going with this. 'Cardinal, you keep referencing back to authority and structural responsibility, but it is the case, isn't it, that within the Church you would expect and indeed might I suggest the community would expect - that each priest would act responsibly, regardless of their position?"
He was met again with some vintage obfuscation, capped off with a familiar Pell trope: you people just don't understand my Church. 'To understand the Catholic Church's structure and who has authority, you go to Church law, and according to the canon law of the Church, you can there identify the different levels of responsibility - it might be a jurisdictional responsibility; it might be a moral responsibility at different levels. But it's from the canon law that you decide what the situation is within the Church.'
And here the Chair got to the nub of Pell's true thinking on this, the bubble he finds himself in, where the ordinary rules of morality, decency and even criminal responsibility are leavened to varying degrees by byzantine Church structures. (p.203)”
― Louise Milligan, Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell