The Michigan prosecutor who won convictions against the mother and father of teenage school shooter Ethan Crumbley said Friday her goal was not to ensure that the sins of other criminally convicted children are visited on their parents in court, but to prevent further gun violence.
“I hope it leads to more prevention of gun violence,” Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said. “I hope it leads to people taking more responsibility. I don’t want a situation where a lot of prosecutors are charging people or parents for things that their children did, or are doing.”
But the twin convictions of James and Jennifer Crumbley — the first parents to be held criminally responsible for a mass shooting committed by their child — create a legal precedent that could lead to prosecutors to bring more cases against parents for the actions of their children.
Lawyers are “trained to argue cases on precedent,” Ekow Yankah, a law professor at the University of Michigan, told NBC News. “And I can see prosecutors using this in cases that won’t get this kind of national attention.”
“This case was particularly terrible and had a unique set of facts,” Yankah said of the 2021 mass shooting in a Detroit suburb that left four Oxford High School students dead. “I don’t know to what extent it will open the floodgates to similar kinds of prosecutions, but precedent has its own power and law.”
On Thursday, a jury in Pontiac, Michigan, convicted Crumbley’s father, James Crumbley, of involuntary manslaughter. His wife, Jennifer Crumbley, was convicted in February of the same charge.
The Crumbleys each face up to 15 years in prison for each of four counts of involuntary manslaughter. In Michigan, felony sentences that rise out of the same event must run concurrently, so the most the judge can impose is 15 years in total. They are scheduled to be sentenced on April 9.
In both trials, prosecutors made the same argument: While neither James nor Jennifer Crumbley knew…
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