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Ethan Crumbley Parents Found Guilty of Manslaughter
Ethan Crumbley is a school shooter who killed four people. This does not make him unique. What makes him unique is that his parents have been found guilty of manslaughter for it. https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/16/us/james-jennifer-crumbley-trials-differences/index.html
The legal theory is that the parents were extraordinarily negligent- and, TBH, at least the mom seems to have been a shitty parent who ignored her son's obvious mental illness- and provided a firearm to their son despite clear evidence he was at least a potential danger to others. I don't think this legal theory is particularly novel even if it's rarely used; when I took my CHL class in much more firearms-friendly Texas I was told that if I provided a minor with a handgun, I could be held liable should they kill someone with it. But on to some article quotes:
So his father was convicted under the idea that he had a positive responsibility to store firearms in a way inaccessible to a mentally ill teenaged boy. I'm not an expert on Michigan law, but I'm pretty sure that the letter of the law says something along those lines in most states, and it would be very difficult to argue that he doesn't have a moral responsibility. But maybe he was a responsible gun owner who took measures to keep his troubled son away from household guns that a reasonable person would expect to be sufficient:
Nevermind. While I'm leery of the precedent this sets for obvious reasons, I have no trouble acknowledging that James Crumbley deserves to go to prison and, were I a juror, I'd probably have voted to convict. On to the mom's case.
This does not paint a picture of good parenting. Furthermore,
IANAL, but Jennifer Crumbley's legal defense strategy sounds sufficiently suboptimal that she seems to just have generally very bad judgement, maybe the mental illness runs in the family. That being said, I'm a lot less comfortable with the legal logic here- being a generally shitty parent who has bad judgement and neglects her son's mental health problem isn't illegal. I'm comfortable calling her a shitty parent and saying she should be called out for it but it kinda seems like a novel legal theory of the sort that's generally bad.
Personally I doubt this case will be widely replicated; the Crumbleys seem to have had much-more-damning-than-average facts. But let's go to the general principle; parents sometimes being held responsible when their minor child kills someone doesn't seem terribly controversial, no doubt had they left out a gun and their five year old killed someone using it to play cowboys and indians this would be a rare scenario but not a case that grabbed much attention. And it doesn't seem controversial either that Ethan Crumbley was sufficiently crazy to be less than 100% responsible for his actions. On the other hand, parents of teen murderers getting tried for manslaughter is definitely abnormal; teen murderers almost certainly suffer from distinctly below average parenting, too, although I would expect that in the median case that's due to a single mother's weird work schedule or poverty rather than a wealthy woman neglecting her kid. I think the difference is that these parents had, at least materially, the ability to do better. His mom obviously knew her son was showing signs of being crazy but preferred horses, extramarital affairs, and booze, his dad had a gun safe but didn't store the murder weapon in it(and when I was a teen with my own guns they were required to be stored in my dad's gun safe, which seems like the reasonable policy for your teen owning guns). This wasn't a single mom working a shift that made it hard to pay much attention to her kid, which is a lot closer to the family scenario for most minor criminals and for most mass shooters.
There's some legal messiness about the standard of causation, but in an environment with any serious level of social trust, the Crumbley's would fall fast into the sphere where no one looks that closely at it, even had they just fallen down the stairs. Even gunnies whose literal jobs involve poking at the law agree with the moral question for this specific case. I'd be interested to know how consistently parents of teenagers who drive drunk are held criminally responsible, but I dunno that the data is really available in meaningful detail, and guns are different enough, and it'd still be a good arg in favor of tightening up the law then.
Part of that fall-through-cracks is because Michigan's statutes were pretty wonky: conviction for improper storage of firearm w/ a minor would have been far more clear-cut, but they didn't really clearly exist in 2021.
The court of appeals did, in fact try to spell this one out as good-for-this-ride-or-worse-only:
The trouble's that there's not much social trust. The Crumbley's are going to prison for a decade because their kid had a hallucinations and intrusive thoughts that the parents blew off, and that's extremely bad. What if he'd just written a lot about depression, and they'd ignored that? If he'd had the same problems, but not gotten sent to the principal's office the same day? He was a 15-year-old they allowed to have effective control of a handgun, would that change if he was over 18? 21? 25? They didn't lock (or 'locked' with 0-0-0) firearms. If they used a cheap 20-USD trigger lock that doesn't actually work, would that have broken the chain of causation?
These are problems for any serious statute with where the caselaw involves a ton of phrases like 'reasonably foreseeable', but most serious statutes don't have a sizable lobby pushing for (and often getting!) laws enforcing blanket criminal consqeuences in related context. The parade-of-horribles where someone is criminally liable because 'obviously' the seller knew this guy shouldn't have a gun, he shot people is an implicit goal for the Brady Bunch. I'll give Rov_Scam props for stating outright "a number of requirements that seem onerous but that's the point", but that only makes Rov honest; it doesn't help with the general problem.
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