The mother of a school shooter was convicted of manslaughter. What does this mean for other cases?

A Michigan mother could face up to 60 years in prison after a jury convicted her on Tuesday on four counts of involuntary manslaughter, after her teenage son killed four students in a school shooting in 2021.

Prosecutors argued Michigan law compelled Jennifer Crumbley to prevent her then-15-year-old son, Ethan, from harming others, and the jury in the case agreed.

Now 17, Ethan is serving a life sentence after pleading guilty to murder and terrorism charges in October 2022. (His father, James Crumbley, will have his own involuntary manslaughter trial in March.)

Jennifer Crumbley’s conviction is a first-of-its-kind verdict in a U.S. school shooting case, raising questions about the extent to which a parent can be held responsible for the criminal actions of their child.

Legal experts say it could have broader implications for the U.S. criminal justice system.

Detroit-based criminal lawyer Michael Bullotta believes the jury’s manslaughter verdict was “an overreach,” saying he thought the trial would have ended in a not guilty verdict or a hung jury.

“I have a problem with the legal concept of parents causing their children to commit crimes by being bad parents,” he said. “That’s what I think this case represents and that’s the dangerous part.”

“The law has changed a bit today,” said Ekow N. Yankah, a law professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich. “Whether or not this sets precedent in spectacular cases, this will have an important effect in cases we never see.”

A way to push back

This isn’t the first time in the U.S. that parents have been charged in a gun violence case involving their children. 

The mother of a six-year-old boy in Virginia who took a nine-millimetre semi-automatic handgun to school and shot his teacher last year is serving a 21-month prison sentence on various felony firearm convictions. She was sentenced separately in November to two years in prison for felony child neglect. 

There’s also the case of a father in Illinois who pleaded guilty last fall to seven counts of misdemeanor felony conduct for signing a state firearm owners identification card for his son, despite concerns about his behaviour. His son was underage at the time, but was legally allowed to possess a firearm three years later, when he was accused of killing seven people in a mass shooting at a Fourth of July parade in 2022.

In Jennifer Crumbley’s case, prosecutors argued that even though she didn’t pull the trigger, she stored the gun and ammunition in a negligent manner and should be held criminally responsible for the four deaths.

Prosecutors also said she and her husband knew Ethan was mentally in a “downward spiral” and posed a danger to others, yet allowed him access to firearms, including the nine-millimetre pistol they purchased as his Christmas present and that was used to kill his classmates.

Jennifer Crumbley testified in her own defence, saying her husband was responsible for securely storing firearms in the family home, and that while her son had been anxious about getting into college and what he would do with his life, she did not think his problems merited seeing a psychiatrist.

Yankah wasn’t entirely surprised the prosecutor took the step to pursue such a serious charge against the parent of a child who committed mass murder. 

“We live in a country where there are just too many school shootings,” he said. 

In the first month of 2024, for example, there have been seven school shootings in the U.S. that resulted in death or injury, according to tracking by the website Education Week. The site tallied 38 such shootings last year and 51 in 2022.

“Whenever [these shootings] rip a community apart, some prosecutor might want to stand up and say, ‘This is my way of fighting back in a country where we don’t have other legal tools to push back against school shootings,'” Yankah said. 

Gun safety advocates praised the jury for taking such an action. 

Josh Horwitz, co-director of the Center for Gun Violence Solutions, part of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Md., told Reuters that Jennifer Crumbley’s conviction showed “the jury understood that in today’s America, purchasing a handgun for a troubled teenager was grossly negligent and put the community at risk.”

Convicted of bad parenting?

Bullotta said that under Michigan law, an involuntary manslaughter conviction requires a proximate cause — that the defendant’s actions were sufficiently related to the cause of death. 

But he said Jennifer Crumbley was convicted of what she didn’t do to prevent the shooting. Bullotta doubts she would have foreseen that her son would go on a shooting rampage at school, regardless of her perceived negligence. 

He thinks Tuesday’s verdict could “inspire some other ill-conceived prosecutions” and that there could be an expectation for prosecutors’ offices to look deeply into whether or not parents should be charged whenever a school shooting happens. 

University of British Columbia law professor Isabel Grant said it’s possible that a parent in Canada could face a manslaughter charge in connection with a killing carried out by their child, although she’s not aware of any such cases in this country.

She said the charge of manslaughter is “a very sweeping offence” that could apply in some situations, even though parents in Canada aren’t generally held responsible for crimes committed by their children.

“If you breach a duty that you owe in law and that causes a death, if your conduct was a marked and substantial departure from that of a reasonable parent in the circumstances, you can be held liable for that death,” Grant said. “It’s not that you’re being held liable for what your child has done. You are being held liable for what you have done.”

Out of sight, out of mind

Yankah says the real effects of Jennifer Crumbley’s conviction may play out in cases that never go to trial but end in plea bargains, which don’t often garner the same degree of attention as a case like Crumbley’s. 

He believes this precedent is something prosecutors will “have in their back pocket” to dangle as a threat of conviction and convince defendants to take a guilty plea.

A study from the American Bar Association last year found that nearly 98 per cent of convictions were the result of guilty pleas.

Yankah said a legal precedent like this may be more likely to affect Black and other people of colour in the criminal justice system.

He gave the example of a truancy law in California that puts parents at risk of facing stiff fines or even jail time if their child is chronically absent from school without reason. But reports have shown that there were racial and socioeconomic disparities when it comes to unexcused absences, suggesting people in those groups could be disproportionately penalized. 

“Anytime we add new tools and criminal law in America, one worries that — [and] our past failed experiments teach us — it will be aimed at the most politically vulnerable,” Yankah said.