Trial Tests if Parents are Responsible for Child's Crimes

A trial started in Michigan today, seeking to answer a difficult question. Can parents be held responsible when their child commits a mass shooting? In this particular case, the teenage shooter has already been convicted. But as William Brangham reports, officials are also seeking to prosecute his parents in a case that could break new legal ground.

On November 30th, 2021, tragedy came to snowy Oxford High School in Michigan. A student opened fire, killing four students, injuring seven others. The gunman, then 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley received a life sentence last year. But now, his parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley face their own charges of involuntary manslaughter. It is the first-of-its-kind effort to hold parents criminally responsible for a school shooting done by their child.

This case is unprecedented in Oakland County and perhaps the state.

Prosecutors say the Crumbleys new Ethan was troubled, but acted negligently. James Crumbley bought for his son the gun he used to kill his classmates. Concerns flagged by the school went unheeded. The day before the shooting, on November 29th, Oxford High informed Jennifer Crumbley that her son was looking up ammunition on his phone. She texted him, "LOL, I'm not mad. You have to learn not to get caught." Hours before the shooting began, teachers discovered this worksheet on Ethan's desk, covered with violent warning signs. Below a drawing of a gun, he wrote, "The thoughts won't stop, help me." And "Blood everywhere," and a drawing of a bullet. When a teacher saw the sheet, he scratched much of it out, including what appears to be a shooting victim dripping with blood. (01:52) Ethan's parents were called into school that morning, but officials say they resisted taking him home and made no mention of any gun. Shortly after they left, their son began his rampage. When news of the shooting got out in the community, Jennifer Crumbley texted her son, writing, "Ethan, don't do it," but it was too late. Karen McDonald is the Oakland County Prosecutor.

The notion that a parent could read those words and also know that their son had access to a deadly weapon, that they gave him is unconscionable and I think it's criminal.

The Defense claims the Crumbleys had no way of knowing how troubled their son really was. Both have pleaded not guilty. (02:37) For more on this case and its broader implications, I'm joined by Ekow Yankah. He's the Thomas M. Cooley professor of law, at the University of Michigan. Professor Yankah, thank you so much for being back on the NewsHour. As a scholar of the law, what do you make of this case? It is not that common that we hold other people responsible for the actions of another.

No, that's exactly right. In fact, one of the first things you learn as a One L law student in criminal law, in other fields, is that even under some really awful facts, when other people take action, that as we say severs the causal chain, it makes it not your action. It's a classic example in first-year law school to say that if you give somebody a gun and they threaten to kill themselves and you give them the gun, you encourage them to kill themselves and they do, you're not responsible. So even under odious circumstances, you're typically not responsible. That being said, one of the things we do to our law students is push them on how far these examples can go. How terrible do I have to make the facts? How odious do I have to make it? How close to the edge before you finally say the law has to give? And the truth is, if I was coming up with an exam question, I couldn't come up with facts that were more upsetting, more cutting, and seemingly more disturbing than the ones we have in this case.

Given all of that about the law, what do you think are the biggest challenges facing the prosecution trying to prosecute this case?

So I think there are two challenges. The one we already spoke about is just the kind of bedrock legal principle, and that's something that is deep in our legal culture. That is human beings are responsible for their own actions. The prosecution here is going to be going up against what every judge, what every other lawyer has learned, what every defense lawyer has learned, and what they're going to be conveying to the jury as our bedrock principle. But setting aside the legal machinations, there's also just what the law reflects, the kind of moral intuition that we aren't responsible when other people do bad things. (04:49) And that's going to be true even when these facts are heartbreaking. Because you're going to have people thinking about, of course I'm doing my best to be a great parent, of course I'm trying to bring my child up to be successful and flourishing. But what if you have a child who's difficult, problematic, has shoplifted, gets in fights at school? I think quite outside of the dry, technical legal language, there are going to be a lot of people out there who just think when 13, 16, 17, 18, when will it be the case that I can't be held responsible, no matter the best I do for my child, for their abhorrent behavior?

Does the fact that Michigan passed a law that in essence makes it a crime for you not to secure a gun and a minor gets access to that, doesn't that imply sort of de facto that what these parents did at the time wasn't against the law?

Well, you're certainly right that in the wake of highly visible events, we often pass laws. And that is by some people going to be taken as a defense. But of course, sometimes we pass laws to make our legal responsibilities more clear or to help fill a lacuna. And to be perfectly honest, criminal law scholars know that we often pass laws just to add penalties to things that are already illegal. So for example, I remember when Philadelphia passed an anti-carjacking statute. It was frankly an opportunity for public officials to say we're doing something about it. But nobody really thinks that before that law was passed, carjacking was legal. So of course, they'll make the argument that this wasn't illegal when it happened, but the prosecutor is going to argue that this was criminally negligent even under the slew of statutes they had before this specific law was passed.

This prosecutor has made it very clear that she hopes that this will spur other gun owners, basically to do a better job of securing their firearms. And I'm just curious if you think that if this prosecution is successful, that this will spur other prosecutors in other states, maybe elsewhere in the country to take on similar cases?

Look, the law lives on precedent, and I certainly think it's the case, as we said that given that we have this kind of deep legal intuition that you're never going to be responsible for somebody else's acts, a successful prosecution in a highly visible and painful case of a school shooting is going to rocket across the country. It's not an accident that it'll be on PBS on all the major news channels, and that will give prosecutors one more tool in their arsenal. Because of the nature of precedent and because anytime you do something unprecedented, legal actors are going to take notice. I think there's no question that prosecutors are going to use this as a tool. Sadly, we should also admit, these cases are incredibly painful and incredibly visible and all too repetitive. And so the fact that there's a successful prosecution in this case, if there's a successful prosecution in this case, there'll almost certainly be another.

All right. Ekow Yankah, Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me.