A trial date has been set for the parents of the Oxford High School shooter after the Michigan Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected their appeal request, the final of their several attempts to avoid trial.
The trial for the Oxford shooter’s parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, is scheduled to begin on Jan. 23, 2024, according to court records from Tuesday. The parents had been bound over for trial for involuntary manslaughter charges by lower courts, but they continued to appeal that decision until it reached the Michigan Supreme Court -- which decided Tuesday to deny their appeal request.
Charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter each in connection with the Nov. 30, 2021, Oxford shooting, the parents were officially expected to stand trial as of Tuesday, Oct. 3, when their trial date was also reportedly set. The state high court’s decision came just a few days after a judge decided that their son, the Oxford shooter, could be sentenced to life in prison without parole despite his age.
The parents have been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, one for each of the four students murdered by their son: 14-year-old Hana St. Juliana; 16-year-old Tate Myre; 17-year-old Madisyn Baldwin; and 17-year-old Justin Shilling. Both parents are accused of neglecting their son, buying him the gun used in the shooting, and failing to take steps that could have prevented the massacre, which also left seven people injured.
The parents’ charges and upcoming trial are setting a new precedent: James and Jennifer Crumbley are the first parents of a mass school shooter to face charges in connection with the shooting in the United States.
What is involuntary manslaughter?
Involuntary manslaughter is one of the lowest homicide-related charges someone can receive after a person is killed. Involuntary manslaughter happens when a person’s death resulted from another person’s negligent or criminal actions.
To qualify as involuntary manslaughter, the death was not intentional or planned, but rather technically accidental. Still, the person charged with involuntary manslaughter is believed to be responsible for the death, despite their intentions.
An involuntary manslaughter charge in Michigan is a felony and carries a punishment of up to 15 years in prison, and/or a fine of up to $7,500.
What the parents are accused of
The prosecution accuses the Crumbleys of being grossly negligent toward their son by failing to provide proper care when he reported having hallucinations and struggling with his mental health. Instead, the parents purchased a handgun for their son and failed to address concerns presented by school staff leading up to the shooting, prosecutors argue.
Gross negligence in Michigan means that a person willfully disregarded the results to others “that might follow from an act or failure to act,” according to the state. In this case, the parents are accused of demonstrating a significant lack of concern about their son’s emotional state and actions, and what he might do to himself or others without proper intervention from them.
Prosecutors believe the parents knew that their son posed a danger to others, and failed to provide “ordinary care” that could have prevented the mass shooting. According to prosecutors, that ordinary care could’ve looked like taking their son home from school when called in for a meeting the morning of the shooting, or looking in his backpack during that meeting for the recently purchased gun, or storing that gun securely at their home, among other things.
Michigan law doesn’t define one way in which ordinary care is exercised, prosecutors said in March. Parents do a have “duty of care,” however, which is their legal obligation to exercise reasonable care for their children -- which looks like providing food, housing, schooling, health care (including mental health) and the like.
Prosecutors have argued the parents neglected their son by failing to provide him with appropriate mental health care in the months before the shooting. During the Court of Appeals hearing, the defense agreed that the parents handled their circumstances poorly.
The defense said then that the parents could have gotten their son into therapy, and said the parents weren’t well equipped to handle several factors in this case. " ... I will concede that these parents made tremendously bad decisions,” defense attorney Shannon Smith said, in part, in March.
Still, the defense argues that the parents could not have foreseen the mass shooting based on what they knew. On the other side, prosecutors say that the parents had significant knowledge about their son’s poor mental state and his interest in guns and shooting, and could have foreseen such a tragedy.
The legal specifics
The Court of Appeals hearing that took place before the court made its decision on March 23 offered a closer look at the legal specifics being considered by the judges. The parents had appealed a lower court’s decision to bind them over to trial to the state’s appellate court.
Defense attorneys argue that the prosecution’s evidence is not enough to support conviction of James and Jennifer Crumbley. Appellate judges pointed out that the issue of evidence is more commonly considered during and/or after a trial, not before.
After hearing arguments from both sides and asking several questions, the appellate court maintained that the parents should go to trial.
Part of the involuntary manslaughter charges involves alleged negligence on behalf of the Oxford shooter’s parents.
In Michigan, criminal negligence is defined as the “failure to use reasonable care with respect to a material element of an offense to avoid consequences that are the foreseeable outcome of the person’s conduct with respect to a material element of an offense and that threaten or harm the safety of another.”
“Foresee” is a keyword here. Whether or not the parents could have foreseen fatal mass shooting was the largest debate in the appellate courtroom in March.
The appellate judges did not say definitively then if they believe James and Jennifer Crumbley could have foreseen the mass shooting carried out by their son. At least two of the three judges did say, however, they believe causation would be easy to prove in this case.
“... this is involuntary manslaughter – which is malice-free homicide. In this sort of case, all we’re really looking for is foreseeability, aren’t we?” said appeals court Judge Christopher Yates.
“We’ll grant you that you have to show factual cause and proximate cause. I think factual cause, at least under probable cause standard, is not even worth discussing today,” the judge continued. “But, in terms of proximate cause: Isn’t it just simply a question of foreseeability? And, as Judge Murray says, something beyond negligence can be foreseeable, and it seems to me these sorts of facts are exactly where it would be foreseeable.”
The legal issue of “negligence” is broken down into a few sub-categories, including “causation.” There are multiple types of causation, including factual and proximate.
Factual causation determines if the incident -- in this case, a mass shooting -- would have occurred without the action or inaction of the defendants. The appellate judges seemed to agree that factual causation is obvious in this case, saying that it’d be easy to prove that if the parents had taken their son out of school the morning of the shooting, the Oxford shooting wouldn’t have happened.
Proximate causation determines if there is a cause behind the incident that can hold the defendant legally liable in that incident. Proximate cause was debated in March. The prosecution said then that in the lower court’s hearing of the case, the court focused more on factual causation than on proximate causation.
The defense argues that there isn’t any argument for any causation between the Crumbley parents and the Oxford shooting. With the parents officially headed to trial, it is likely this topic will be strongly debated.
In a criminal case, prosecutors must prove that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt -- the highest level of proof there is. This means that the proof must show a great certainty that the defendant is guilty.
Shooter to be sentenced soon
As the shooter’s parents wait to stand trial, the shooter himself was just cleared last week to be sentenced to life in prison without parole, despite his age.
The shooter -- convicted of 24 felonies for the school shooting, including first-degree murder and terrorism causing death -- is scheduled to be sentenced in early December. During that in-person sentencing hearing, victims will be allowed to make victim impact statements.
The shooter and his parents have all been lodged at the Oakland County Jail for nearly two years, though officials said they have been kept separate and without contact.
More: Oxford shooter can be sentenced to life in prison without parole, judge decides