Reply to Jennifer Crumbley found guilty. Hope this opens the door for prosecuting parents for their children's violent crimes.

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Reply to "Jennifer Crumbley found guilty. Hope this opens the door for prosecuting parents for their children's violent crimes."

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[quote=Anonymous]I’m the former prosecutor who posted up the page.

I’ve worked in the system long enough to see the dearth of resources available to families with mentally ill children - even families with plentiful financial resources and connections at the highest level. I would urge you all to familiarize yourselves with the story of Virginia senator Creigh Deeds and his son Gus, who stabbed his father multiple times and then took his own life - hours after being involuntarily committed by a court for psychiatric treatment, but turned away from the hospital for a lack of beds to admit him into at that time. That is just one case which highlights the problem and that even people with plenty of money cannot get their children help in our broken mental health system, never mind families with limited resources and who lack the sophistication to navigate the system the way highly educated and connected parents have.

No, parents should not be held responsible for everything their child does once the child reaches the age of legal majority. Only in very limited circumstances where the child is under guardianship even as an adult because they are legally deemed incompetent would that even begin to make sense.

This issue with the Crumbleys is very clear cut: Ethan was a minor who under the law could not possess a handgun and Michigan has a safe storage law for firearms. The handgun they bought him came with a free trigger lock device which was still in the plastic wrapper. If they had simply opened that wrapper and taken the seconds required to utilize that trigger lock, the four kids Ethan killed would still be alive and Ethan would more than likely still have his life too.

All the other stuff - the way they lived, the state of their marriage, the way they ignored Ethan’s cries for help - isn’t as relevant but just shows that they were not great people or parents. The fact that they were called into the school because of his sketches and words on an assignment that day, including a picture of a handgun, and that they refused to take him home and didn’t mention to the school that there was a firearm in the house so the school could search his backpack - that’s total negligence.

Even in the absence of a safe storage law I think most juries could be easily convinced that if there is a firearm in the home and a minor child gets possession of it, that is prima facie evidence of negligence. Americans are outraged over school shootings and other gun violence, and they want to see accountability. If prosecutors have the guts to charge firearm owners with involuntary manslaughter when they fail to secure their firearms and a MINOR child uses the firearms to either accidentally or intentionally wound or kill someone, including themselves, juries will convict more often than not, I think. Let’s give them the chance, anyway.[/quote]

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