The jailed parents last month during a video hearing when theior request for lower bond was denied. (Photo: Screenshot)
A prominent law professor who led a federal prosecutor's office for eight years sees the negligent manslaughter case against Oxford school shooter Ethan Crumbley's parents as "an important step."
Joyce Vance: "A child who poses some risk simply cannot be allowed access to a firearm." (Photo: Instagram)
"Holding parents criminally accountable for failing to secure guns in their homes might encourage them to be more responsible," Joyce Vance writes in a New York Times guest column Tuesday.
We don’t hold parents criminally accountable for everything their children do.
But it's different when adults buy a child a gun, oversee their child's training to use it and leave the gun where it is readily accessible. It's worse still when parents conceal the child's access to the gun from school officials, who warn them he is having vivid, violent fantasies, and then insist to those officials that he remain at school.
A preliminary hearing for Jennifer and James Crumbley began Tuesday in Rochester Hills District Court, where it resumes Feb. 24. Their 15-year-old son, charged separately, is accused of killing four schoolmates Nov. 30 and wounding six others with a gun the couple bought with him as a holiday season gift four days earlier. The parents are jailed, unable to post $500,000 bonds.
Vance, a U.S. attorney in northern Alabama from 2009-17 during Barack Obama's presidential terms, now teaches law at the University of Alabama. She's an MSNBC commentator and co-hosts a "Sisters in Law" podcast with Barbara McQuade of Ann Arbor, a fellow Obama era appointee who also was dismissed by his successor.
Vance's op-ed commentary praises Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald for "a rare and welcome moment of accountability, with the potential to provide some much-needed deterrence in a country awash in guns."
A conviction would set an outer limit on how permissive parents can be with firearms without exposing themselves to criminal charges. A child who poses some risk simply cannot be allowed access to a firearm. ...
Greater concern that carelessness could be criminal is likely to discourage people from reckless behavior and encourage more attention on how they store and handle their guns. ...
In an era of permissive gun ownership, the prosecution of parents may provide one of the few available paths to keeping our children safer.
Related yesterday:
911 Call from Ethan Crumbley's Dad: "I Think My Son Took the Gun'
