Crouch Sr. (the abbreviated version) (and jr.)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 154658

BookishRose wrote:
> <big snip>         
>  Yes but [Barty Crouch Sr.]didn't have to send him to Azkaban did
he? I'm being controversial here, but I'd like to think if I had a son
and the decision of whether or not to send him to Azkaban was in my
hands I would do everything within my power to stop him being sent
away, no matter what he'd done. <snip>
> 
> The poor kid, (and he was a kid at nineteen) was pleading and
> actually screaming for his father, and what did Crouch sr. say; "I
> have no son". Jeez, model parent huh?
> 
> I mean surely he could have asked someone else to oversee the trial.
> It was grossly inappropriate for him to be legally involved in his
> own son's trial, except as a character witness, even if he did do
> the legal thing. In the pensieve young Barty seemed like a kid
> who has gone waaay out of his depth, no matter how good his acting
> is. I think his fathers treatment of him was a large factor in his
> fanaticism.
<snip>

Carol responds:
Yes, it was a bad idea for Barty Sr. to oversee his son's sentencing
(we're not seeing the trial itself), but given Barty Jr.'s later use
of all three Unforgiveable Curses after twelve years of living under
the Imperius Curse, I think he was a full-fledged DE when he was
caught. Barty Sr. surely would not have sent his own son to Azkaban--a
blot on the family name he was so proud of--unless he was absolutely
certain of his guilt. His wand must have been shown by Priori
Incantatem to have been used to cast the Cruciatus Curse, which
carries a mandatory sentence of a life sentence to Azkaban. 

Barty Jr. at nineteen is a man by both WW and RL standards. He is
responsible for his own actions and choices--to join the DEs in the
first place and to help Bellatrix and the Lestrange brothers Crucio
the Longbottoms into insanity in the hopes of finding out what had
happened to their master. ("We alone tried to find him," says Bella,
who surely would not credit Barty Jr. as part of the "we" if he had
not been a full partner in the endeavor.) IMO, his begging for mercy
in the Pensieve scene, while it does make his father look cold and
cruel, primarlily demonstrates his cowardice. Unlike Bellatrix, he
doesn't even have the courage of his convictions. (Or maybe it isn't
courage in her case but a conviction of self-righteousness, but in any
case, for him his own skin takes precedence over his otherwise
fanatical loyalty, at least pre-Azkaban.) 

If Crouch Sr.'s madness in OoP is any indication of what really
happened, he seems to have been proud of his son's twelve OWLs at the
end of his fifth year. (He speaks of inviting the Fudges to dinner to
celebrate, IIRC.) Exactly what happened between that time and his
son's decision to join the DEs, we don't know. But joining forces with
the likes of Bellatrix Lestrange to Crucio an Auror and his wife (or a
pair of Aurors, if you prefer the revised version in OoP) cannot be
justified by "Daddy didn't love me." It cannot, IMO, be justified for
any reason. It's an act of pure evil and cruelty taken to sadistic
extremes for the sake of finding out the whereabouts of the vaporized
Dark Lord. How can such an action possibly be justified? The entire WW
was outraged, and understandably so.

Barty Sr.'s mistake, IMO, was not in sentencing his own (clearly
guilty) son to Azkaban but in weakly agreeing to his dying wife's plan
to impersonate their equally ill son. Had he not done so, trapping
himself into rescuing and healing his Death Eater son, and then using
the enemy's own Unforgiveable Curse to control him, he himself would
not have been Imperio'd by Wormtail and AK'd by that same son, who not
only placed Harry's name in the Goblet of Fire intending to turn him
over to LV at the end of the year (and be "rewarded above all others"
for his loyal service to the Dark Lord) but Imperio'd the real Moody
and kept him in a trunk for nine months so he could impersonate him
and Imperio'd the innocent Viktor Krum to make him Crucio Cedric
Diggory, not to mention that Barty Jr. performed that same
Unforgiveable Curse on his own students under the pretense of showing
them what they were facing. No doubt he'd have Crucio'd them rather
than merely performing that curse on the spider in front of the very
boy whose parents he had helped to Crucio into insanity had he been
able to get away with it.

Unlike Regulus, who joined the DEs at about the same age and regretted
his decision, facing death rather than remain with them and trying
through the stolen Horcrux to destroy the Dark Lord who had seduced
him into evil, Barty Jr. had no qualms about casting Dark curses (if
Bellatrix's words about casting Unforgiveable are any indication, he
enjoyed casting them) and developed a fanatical loyalty to the most
evil wizard in the history of the WW.

Carol, who feels no sympathy whatever for Barty Jr. and thinks that
the Crouches, taken together, show that habitually performing the
Unforgiveable Curses, for whatever reason, corrupts the soul