If I Committed A Crime, My Mom Would Personally Escort Me To Jail

One of the things I found most curious about the Casey Anthony trial was that it seemed that her parents both thought that she was guilty as sin but also that they wanted her to avoid punishment for her actions. I joked yesterday that if I ever did anything like this to my children, my mother would be leading the campaign to see me imprisoned for life. I called her to ask her if my suspicions were true and she confirmed them.

Carolyn explained to me that she wouldn’t want me to get the death penalty but “I can’t see how — it would not make sense for me to have you out free, walking around, without any punishment. I would think that you would need to be punished.”

She reminded me that as Christians we must take responsibility for our sins and show contrition by accepting blame if we’re guilty.

“Everyone says ‘Well my mother would do the same thing for me.’ No way. I wouldn’t do it for you. Because you’re not helping your child to have them avoid justice. To me more important would be your salvation and I would rather have you spend the time being productive in jail and knowing that when you die you would be in heaven than out on the streets not admitting what you did. If you killed my granddaughter, I would not want you out walking around.”

She also pointed out, rightly, that she would have figured out I was lying within four hours, as opposed to however long it took Anthony’s parents to realize.

“Her mother should have known her daughter well enough to know she was a liar. I would not have accepted so easily your story. I would have known you were lying. I would have figured that out in about four hours. I mean to tell you, I would have demanded you tell us what happened, would not have let you out of my sight or stood by and let you lie. I would not let you out partying.”

My mother-in-law, on the other hand, would probably mortgage her house to get the best defense attorney money could buy if her kids did something wrong. That would be only if she’d failed to smuggle them out of the country to avoid prosecution.

What about you? How far would you go, if anywhere, to help your children avoid punishment for crimes they committed?

At this point, it seems I’m taking after my mother. When my daughter recently took a toy from a playmate, the nearby children pointed their fingers at her and called her a thief. Which she was. I backed them up.