Parents of Michigan School Shooter Appeal Manslaughter Charge

Should parents be held legally liable if their child shoots people? That’s the question at the center of a Michigan case straight out of the Law & Order franchise. The case stems from a 2021 mass shooting at Oxford High School, in which Ethan Crumbley killed four people. Crumbley’s parents, James and Jennifer, were charged with involuntary manslaughter. “The Crumbleys are the first parents in America to be charged in a mass school shooting,” notes the Detroit Free Press.

Now, James and Jennifer Crumbley have appealed to the Michigan Court of Appeals. They suggest that the state has no legal ground on which to bring such charges and is trying to change gun policy through criminal charges rather than through legislation.

“The desire to hold someone accountable for the tragedy that occurred at Oxford High School on November 30, 2021, is certainly understandable, but ‘the temptation to stretch the law to fit the evil is an ancient one, and it must be resisted,'” states their appeal, filed on Monday. “There can be little doubt that the charges against Mr. and Mrs. Crumbley … are borne out of a desire to hold persons accountable for criminal acts, where no legal justification exists to do so. However, to extend the law in such a way involves important policy decisions of broad social consequences, reaching far beyond this single case. Such a task, then, should be resolved through the legislative process, and not judicial innovation.”

The state argues James and Jennifer Crumbley are partly responsible for the shooting because they bought him the handgun he used, failed to tell the school about the gun, and allegedly failed to adequately address Ethan’s mental health issues.

The Crumbleys say they kept the gun they bought the son in a secure place and couldn’t know his mental health problems would lead him to commit a horrific crime.

Should the case against the Crumbley parents be allowed to proceed, it would set a dangerous precedent. Maybe most parents of teen shooters don’t purchase the guns their kids use, but most could probably be accused after the fact of not adequately tending to the child’s mental health—when things go wrong, there’s frequently a tendency to assume someone could have done more. And if this stands, it’s probably not long before the rationale extends beyond school shootings to other scenarios where troubled teens commit crimes. But the sad reality is that in many cases, there’s not a lot that parents could do. And punishing parents for the criminal acts of their children may only lead to innocent people being wronged and law enforcement resources being wasted.

In their appeal, the Crumbleys’ defense cites a 1961 Michigan Supreme Court decision involving “a man who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for giving his car keys to a drunk man who got into a car accident that night, killing himself and another motorist,” notes the Free Press. “The Supreme Court ended up vacating that conviction, concluding the man who handed over his keys was not guilty of involuntary manslaughter because he was not present when the accident happened, nor did he counsel the driver in the killing or take part in it.”

If convicted, James and Jennifer Crumbley could be sentenced to up to 15 years in prison. Their trial