UW law professor: Crumbley parents' conviction in school shooting ignored 3 principles of criminal law (2024)

Jennifer and James Crumbley were convicted of involuntary manslaughter because they failed to prevent their son from carrying out a mass shooting at his high school in Oxford, Michigan. The conviction is troubling because to have found the Crumbleys guilty, the jury must have ignored three foundational principles of criminal law.

First, to be guilty of a crime, you must voluntarily commit an act that causes harm. A failure to act is almost never considered a crime unless the person has a legal duty to act. What legal duty did the Crumbleys have to prevent harm to others inflicted by their son?

As parents they obviously have a legal duty to care for their son, but noticeably absent from the case were allegations that the Crumbleys committed acts or omission toward their son that would constitute abuse or neglect. The prosecution’s theory was that they could have done more to prevent what happened, which is true.

But before you can argue that someone is guilty of a crime because they didn’t do more, you must establish that they had a legal duty to take some action. While it is fair to say that anyone who knows that a crime might occur has a moral duty to try and prevent it, we don’t convict someone of a crime because they didn’t do enough to prevent someone else from committing a crime.

Second, to be guilty of a crime, your actions must have been a substantial cause of the harm — not merely a contributing factor, but what the law regards as the proximate cause of the harm. And when your guilt is premised on a failure to act, it is not enough that the result was foreseeable. It must be the natural result of the failure to act. It is hard to imagine a more unnatural act than a school shooting.

For decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that juveniles have an underdeveloped sense of responsibility, which can lead them to commit “impetuous and ill-considered actions and decisions.” There was no evidence that their son had previously committed violent acts, threatened others or showed serious signs of mental illness. Even school administrators didn’t think the evidence warranted sending him home on the day of the shooting.

But by finding the Crumbleys guilty of manslaughter, the juries must have concluded that the shooting was not just imaginable, but that under Michigan law, it was the “natural or necessary result” of their inactions. To come to that conclusion, the jury may have been influenced by two cognitive biases that would have made it seem like the school shooting was inevitable, even though it wasn’t even foreseeable.

The first is hindsight bias, our tendency to look back at an unpredictable event and think it was easily predictable. This bias is especially acute when something horrible happens. We want to see the world as orderly and predictable, because if it is, then we can keep ourselves and our loved ones safe from harm.

The second is the availability bias, our tendency to overestimate the likelihood that something will happen again if it is easy to recall. Events that leave a lasting impression in our minds, like school shootings, are easy to remember and therefore seem more frequent than they actually are.

While the need to make sense of what happened after a school shooting is understandable, and the impulse to find fault inevitable, I question that the Crumbleys should be convicted of involuntary manslaughter because they couldn’t predict the unimaginable.

Third, prosecutors must allege what acts or omissions a defendant committed that make them guilty of a crime and prove those acts or omissions beyond a reasonable doubt. It is unclear what specific acts or omissions the prosecution believed made the Crumbleys guilty of involuntary manslaughter.

Was it that they didn’t get their son counseling well in advance of the shooting? Was it that they purchased a gun for him and then didn’t secure it in their home? Was it that when they were called to school on the day of the shooting and didn’t take him home?

It seems clear that the prosecution’s case rested on the argument that the Crumbleys could have taken various actions that could have prevented the shooting from happening. This “throw everything at them and see what sticks” approach is problematic because it creates a situation where different jurors have different theories as to why the Crumbleys are guilty based on different facts. The result is that the jurors reach a non-unanimous verdict of guilty: All the jurors vote to convict, but not all of them do so based on the same set of facts or the same legal theory.

If a teenager gets into a fight at school and punches a classmate, no prosecutor would consider charging their parents with assault. This tells us the prosecution and conviction of the Crumbleys was motivated by the magnitude of harm caused by their son and not based on a sound legal theory.

The jury’s verdict sends a message to parents: You should think of your children as capable of unimaginable horrors and act accordingly or face the consequences, not of your actions, but of theirs.