On Thursday, James Crumbley, the father of mass school shooter Ethan Crumbley, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. This followed the previous conviction of his wife, Jennifer Crumbley on the same charge. They both face sentencing next month and could receive up to fifteen years in prison, not for killing anyone themselves, but for their failure to prevent their son from doing so. This nearly unprecedented move by the court has understandably left many legal analysts scratching their heads and pondering what this could mean for other parents in the future. The mass shooting at Oxford High School in 2021 was a horror show to be sure, but an alarming precedent has now been set, assuming the convictions aren’t overturned on appeal. (NBC News)
The Michigan prosecutor who won convictions against the mother and father of teenage school shooter Ethan Crumbley said Friday her goal was not to ensure that the sins of other criminally convicted children are visited on their parents in court, but to prevent further gun violence.
“I hope it leads to more prevention of gun violence,” Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said. “I hope it leads to people taking more responsibility. I don’t want a situation where a lot of prosecutors are charging people or parents for things that their children did, or are doing.”
But the twin convictions of James and Jennifer Crumbley — the first parents to be held criminally responsible for a mass shooting committed by their child — create a legal precedent that could lead to prosecutors to bring more cases against parents for the actions of their children.
These prosecutions have made me uneasy from the beginning, but now that both cases have ended in the same fashion I simply don’t see how they can be justified. Let’s start by examining the takeaway quote that county prosecutor Karen McDonald gave to the press, featured in the excerpt above. It comes in two parts, each of which speaks to the intentions of the prosecution as well as the can of worms that has now clearly been opened.
She first said that she hopes “it leads to more prevention of gun violence” and that it “leads to people taking more responsibility.” Karen McDonald is veering far out of her lane here. The public is free to “hope” that stiff sentences for serious crimes will send a message to other potential criminals, but the job of the judge and the prosecutor is to bring forward charges involving a specific crime and assign appropriate punishments if convictions are obtained. They were not supposed to be putting all of the parents in the country on trial or on notice.
She then amazingly goes on to say that she doesn’t want a situation where prosecutors are “charging people or parents for things that their children did or are doing.” And yet that’s precisely what she’s done in this case. Ethan Crumbley was the person who perpetrated the shooting. He was tried and found guilty and is currently spending the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole. The shooter himself repeatedly pointed out that he never informed his parents of his intentions. What his parents have been convicted of is a failure to stop a tragedy that they had no idea was coming.
It’s true that Ethan Crumbley had been drawing disturbing sketches and writing comments that suggested mental and emotional instability. Perhaps it’s possible that his parents should have been more alarmed and acted proactively to intervene. But if a failure to correctly interpret the mental roller coaster of a teenager is now a crime punishable by imprisonment, we’re going to need to build a lot more jails. There was clearly something going wrong in Ethan Crumbley’s life, but most parents of teenagers can tell you horror stories of what happens with children during those formative years. The vast majority of them (thankfully) don’t wind up shooting up a school.
Ekow Yankah, a law professor at the University of Michigan, told NBC News that she doesn’t know to what extent these cases will open a floodgate, “but precedent has its own power and law.” Convicting someone of manslaughter for a crime that they had no knowledge of before it took place was and should have remained unprecedented. I’ll admit that it’s taken me a while to digest all of this, but now that it’s done, I am forced to hope that these convictions are overturned. Criminal trials are supposed to be about justice, not revenge.
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