I’ll repeat myself. The parents were held accountable for what they did.
If your kid breaks a window with a bat and baseball they found in a lot are the parents responsible for the damage?
You can certainly sue the shit of of the parents in that case.
They didnt shoot anyone. If the kid had shot anyone, what were their crimes be?
I think it’s also an attempt to send a message to the legislators, who have refused to address gun violence, while innocents get slaughtered. Time and again.
But this isn’t novel. You can absolutely be tried for murder if your accomplice shoots somebody during a bank robbery. It’s called felony murder and it happens all the time. Yes, I know felony murder is different than what happened here, but it does point out that you can be convicted of a crime even if you didn’t do the underlying act.
The part that is new here is that it was involuntary manslaughter and it involved a mass shooting. The actions that the parents took (buying a gun for their kid, not securing the gun, protecting their kid from school intervention) are actions that plenty of gun-owning parents might do. So they, and their supporters, worry that if their kid goes off the chain and uses that gun to commit violence that they will be held accountable.
To go back to @Procrustus’s repeated point, the parents were tried for Involuntary Manslaughter. These were the two questions the jury had to answer - only one was required to be found for them to be convicted (these were from the mom’s case):
- That Jennifer “caused death” due to her grossly negligent actions, or
- That Jennifer breached her duty as a parent to “exercise reasonable care to control their minor child so as to prevent the minor child from intentionally harming others or prevent the minor child from conducting themselves in a way that creates an unreasonable risk of bodily harm to others.”
I don’t think it has been reported which of these two theories the jury agreed upon, but I could certainly see myself voting for conviction on either one, but particularly the second one.
I have no idea of prior cases in which parents were convicted in similar situations. And I did not follow this case, nor did I read any opinion. I haven’t parsed the reports to see what is supposedly unique and novel about this prosecution and conviction. But my interpretation is that the parents’ actions were so significant that they were complicit in the action, and that the action would not have occurred absent their participation.
An analogous situation that came to mind was, your teenage high schooler wants to have a party while you are gone. You buy him booze for him and his/her underage guests, and you leave your kid keys to the family car to pick up/drop off guests. Your kid is drunkenly driving someone home and gets in an accident with injuries. Does it offend anyone to think those parents ought to bear some criminal liability?
This exact scenario happened recently, with tragic results.
The difference I see is that in this drinking case the parents directly broke a law—providing alcohol to minors—while in the shooting case the parents did several actions which were legal on their own. I think the conviction is probably correct, based on what I know, as negligence or manslaughter seems to often be a set of acts that without context would be legal.
Right. I was also thinking of dram shop liability, where there are specific laws concerning overserving patrons/guests. But even tho the parent might have broken a law re: providing alcohol, I could see them prosecuted for something related to the car accident - in addition to providing alcohol. So I think the analogy - while not exact - has some merit.
What if the kid comes home from drinking someplace else, and the parent gives the kid the car keys? But I’ll stop. I’m not interested in trying to come up with a perfect analogy that I will defend against all criticism.
I’m glad these scumbags are in prison. And I’m not worried about this signalling a trend of prosecutorial overreach WRT parents.
I think this nails it. The parents in the Crumbley case were obviously guilty of egregiously bad and irresponsible parenting, which in itself may or may not be illegal depending on the specific circumstances. In some cases you could have your kids removed from your custody by child care workers, especially if the child is very young, but in the general case being a horrible parent isn’t illegal.
In the Crumbley case this was combined with America’s outrageous gun culture which normalizes and even encourages giving guns to kids or enabling access to them. This is an exact replay of the Sandy Hook tragedy. The only reason the mother in that case wasn’t charged is that she was among the dead.
When two things together are both legal but their combination is potentially deadly (drinking + driving) judging the combined effect is appropriate. It should also (should, but won’t) give serious reconsideration to America’s gun culture.
From a quote upthread:
In the last few months, parents whose children carried out gun violence in other states have pleaded guilty to charges of [reckless conduct] or [neglect, part of a push by some prosecutors to hold parents accountable when they are suspected of enabling deadly violence by their children.
IMHO I’d like to see the parents rot in jail for the rest of their lives (ETA: not really, that was an emotional reaction. But they deserve really serious jail time). I’d be more inclined to give the kids a break. Young kids can likely be rehabilitated from the effects of horrible and negligent parenting.
If that is a legal obligation, she definitely breached it. But that duty seems in itself incredibly broad. If your teenager punches someone in the face, then you failed to control them and someone was harmed. It is one of those laws where it all depends on how it is enforced.
Here is another case where the parent did not pull the trigger, but is being held responsible for their child killing another child with a gun:
Massive negligence on the father’s part, on top of him not allowed to have a gun, and the gun in question being reported stolen. I am sure the defendant here is aware of the Crumbley case, and that outcome does not bode well for him.
Hence the “reasonable care” part. If you exercised a reasonable amount of care, and your kid does something bad anyway, that’s not your fault. If your amount of care was not reasonable, then it is your fault.
Yeah, I think ‘reasonable’ is ill-defined and subject to change. Like how it used to be ‘reasonable’ to leave your 8 year old home alone for an hour, and now in some places that’s illegal. I know that ‘reasonable’ is used a lot in legal terminology though. Maybe there are some guidelines on how to work it out.
I’m not sure if that is an actual law, or just the judge’s instructions, which might be novel. If that is already the law, then this isn’t a precedent or anything shocking. She was clearly in breach of it. If there is some kind of debate, then it is for more tenuous cases.
I don’t know about this law specifically, but lots of laws have verbiage like “reasonable care” in them. And yes, sometimes the notion of what’s “reasonable” does change with time.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing.
Absolutely no problem litigating reasonableness.
The Legal Eagle video posted above has a bit more about the ‘duty to control a child’ argument. The parent needs to know they have the ability to control the child, and also needs to know of the necessity and opportunity. So if your child is playing baseball in an empty lot unbeknownst to you, and hits the baseball through a window, this duty wouldn’t apply. If you watch and laugh while they line up a shot, then it might.
I felt the parents were accessories to the crime, and would have been shocked if they were found not guilty of anything.
If a gangster had walked up to a mob boss and said, “Can I have a gun? I think I’m gonna whack some guys”, and the boss said “Sure, knock yourself out!”, wouldn’t that have been a criminal conspiracy of some sort?
That was how i saw it. If they’d just been bad parents, or inattentive, it would be different. But it seemed they actively helped him commit the crime.