Rubin: Immortality may await convicted Crumbleys, who deserve anything but that

The one time I sat on a jury, the very large defendant acknowledged that he’d punched his 8½-months-pregnant ex-girlfriend a few times, but claimed he didn’t sexually assault her.

I was more sympathetic to him than I am to Jennifer and James Crumbley, who I hope will disappear quietly into the prison system but almost certainly won’t.

Appeals seem inevitable after Tuesday's sentences of 10-15 years apiece for involuntary manslaughter in their son's Oxford High School rampage of November 2021. There are always questions about the judge's rulings in high-profile trials, and three experts I spoke to said the charges themselves figure to come under review.

What seems as unanimous as my jury's verdict years ago is that the courts served the Crumbleys better than they served their son.

Back in 1997, we believed the ex-girlfriend. We found the very large defendant guilty of all charges. My level of sympathy was low.

But he didn’t live in Oxford and own horses, and he didn’t have an attorney who offered to let him do sleepover camp at her guesthouse instead of going to prison. He didn’t pretend to be a victim in a tragedy where four dead children actually were. He’d grown up poor and ill-educated and stayed that way.

Now come the Crumbleys, and there they go after separate convictions on four counts apiece. James, who bought his boy the gun and threatened the prosecutor from jail. Jennifer, whose question 12 minutes into a meeting with school staffers on the day son Ethan would become a murderer was, "Are we done here?"

It would be grand if the next time we heard their names was when they were released sometime next decade.

The appeals will be newsworthy, though, and possibly precedent-setting.

Only time and legal dueling will tell whether nothing changes, whether the sentences shrink, or whether we’ll start at square one, with fresh trials and the same indignant defenses of what two juries decided was indefensibly bad parenting.

Rulings, lessons and debates

The Crumbleys' mentally precarious son was 15 when he yanked the gun from his backpack and began searching for victims. It was a SIG Sauer 9mm pistol he considered an early Christmas present, stored without a trigger lock in his parents’ armoire.

He pleaded guilty in October 2022 and is serving life in prison. He is the only mass school shooter whose parents have been convicted of involuntary manslaughter, and consider how obscene it is that we have a roster of killing frenzies to use for comparison.

University of Michigan law professor Len Niehoff has been employing the Crumbley trials as living lessons in his evidence class.

Students discussed the decisions by Oakland County Circuit Judge Cheryl Matthews to allow jurors to see security footage of the actual slaughter and to learn about journal entries and text messages written by Ethan that alleged his parents ignored his anguish and hallucinations.

They also debated rulings that went against the prosecution, such as the refusal to let jurors know Ethan had killed a bird and kept its head in a jar in his bedroom.

“The issue is whether a piece of evidence is relevant,” Niehoff said, “and the standard for relevance is low.”

Does it tend to amplify an assertion as either more or less likely true? Good enough.

The defense objected to the video footage because the crime in question involved what the parents did or didn't do do before the shooting, not what happened in the building.

Niehoff sided with the judge — “It relates to the potential damage that can occur if parents don’t adequately supervise access to weapons” — and noted that the law leans toward admissibility.

Any potential unfairness “has to substantially outweigh the relevance,” he said, a continual balancing act throughout a contentious trial.

Could Malice Green play a role?

William Cataldo, who spent 16 years as chief of homicide for the Macomb County Prosecutor's Office, recognizes how many tough calls a judge has to make.

He disagrees, however, with the ruling on the surveillance footage. "It was allowed in for shock and sympathy only," he said. "The parents were charged with allowing their son to have the gun and not taking any steps to oversee how he used it — not the murders themselves."

Cataldo, a defense attorney before he became a prosecutor, also said he would have disallowed the notes from Ethan as hearsay — and he wouldn't be surprised to see the convictions overturned.

The Detroit police officers convicted in the 1992 death of Malice Green, he noted, were granted new trials because the jury was shown the movie "Malcolm X," with its 10-second clip of the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles.

"If that's one of the standards," Cataldo asked, "how does this survive?"

Quick decisions and long-term infamy

Then again, said Henry Saad, it's not as though the jury was unaware of the bloodshed in the halls of the school. The footage was appalling, but not surprising.

Saad is of counsel to Plunkett Cooney in Bloomfield Hills. Before that, he was chief judge of the Michigan Court of Appeals, and from that perspective, he contends that "every trial, whether civil or criminal, has numerous errors. It's impossible to avoid. Trial judges have to make snap decisions."

What matters is how important they are. In a particularly nuanced part of the law, "Was the evidence more prejudicial than probative? If prejudicial, would the impact be harmful or harmless error?"

Ethan's journal entries and texts were indeed hearsay, he said, but there are 28 exceptions to the hearsay rule. Does his writing fit into one of them? Was Matthews' decision vital to the prosecution's case?

Reasonable people will disagree, and more reasonable people than I might find ways to sympathize with the Crumbleys.

They have been snappish and unapologetic, but they were in jail for 2½ years awaiting trial for a crime they don't believe they committed.

More: Audio recordings of James Crumbley's allegedly threatening jail calls released

More: James Crumbley apologizes to victims' families, urges further investigation of shooting

The seamiest parts of their lives became literally the stuff of tabloids.

They insist they did not know their son was troubled. Michigan law, at the time, did not require that guns be fitted with a cable lock or stored in a safe or lockbox when a child has access to them.

In the flash of a muzzle, they went from anonymous to despised.

Soon, they may be codified.

As of today, they are simply defendants convicted of crimes. Should the Court of Appeals or Supreme Court nod their collective heads at this fresh application of vicarious liability, the cases could become precedent.

"The doctrine of the Oxford parents," Saad said, with parents responsible for the lethal actions of a child, "may be a principle they teach in law school."

It would be a level of brutal immortality for a pair best forgotten.

Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com.

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Disputes in James, Jennifer Crumbley trials can't hide responsibility