to think this isn't right? mother convicted if manslaughter

[greenacrylicpaint]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68223118

A jury has found a Michigan mother guilty of involuntary manslaughter for failing to stop her son from carrying out a deadly school shooting.

by all means, she didn't come across as mother of the year, but come on.
what sentence will the father get?
an absent father in a similar case?

oh america

You feel sorry for the mother? You feel sorry for a cold, callous, narcissist that may as well have pulled the trigger herself?

Do some thorough research about the case and give your head a wobble.

I do not think that he should have been tried as an adult, especially not for a crime he committed when he was 15 (?).

and I do agree that these arguments seem to be slightly contradictory.

but the parents definitely should be prosecuted.

Yabu. She 100% enable him.

I agree with all this. However, the parents are not scapegoats, as a pp said ( not you). Nobody who texts their ammo buying son "Don't get caught" is a scapegoat.

I don't particularly want the UK to introduce similar laws around being an accessory/enabling crimes, but this seems an entirely appropriate conviction under their laws.

Why? The school where trying to get the parents to picknupnthe child and providing information on where to get emergency metal health care for him.

They can't get health care for a child without the parents consent. So how can you blame the school?

Her parents were not guardians of an underage killer.

They were not just bad parents. They were fundamental in the actions the young man committed.

@DreadPirateRobots I think the UK is completely different, no? Or at least I haven't read of a case with such complete parental enabling.

She bought him a gun. In breach of gun laws.

She bought a gun and handed it to a child with mental health issues.

That’s not being in an impossible situation, that’s being an irresponsible idiot. If you circumnavigate gun laws to buy someone a gun then you you should be prosecuted. Especially when that person is a child with mental health issues.

You need to correct your title OP it's involuntary manslaughter, different sentencing structure and burden of evidence etc.

And I'm 100% behind anything that gets parents to take responsibility for their children's behaviour. Maybe it will teach others to actually parent their children. Four people didn't get to see their kids ever again and this woman's actions directly contributed to that, as a court found.

We accept corporate manslaughter, we should accept that this was involuntary manslaughter too. She had so many opportunities to avert this.

As for people attacking gun laws, while I agree America's gun laws are terrible, in this instance the gun was bought illegally, the child wasn't allowed to have it under the existing law, so having a new law for this family to break wouldn't have changed anything.

what sentence will the father get?

The article you linked says ‘Her husband, James, is facing a separate trial on the same charges.’

Yes they should serve time. If anything they are more at fault than him as he is a child. If they handed him a gun and he accidentally shot himself then they would be accountable. I don’t see the difference.

As I understand it, she wasn't merely convicted for happening to be the parent of a child who committed the crime, but for specific actions she took (including providing him the murder weapon) and knowledge she had about his state of mind and propensity to carry out the attack that she shared privately but not with anyone who could actually help (like school or the police).

This seems like a very specific set of circumstances, and I think it would be pretty easy to differentiate legally between this situation and one where the parents had absolutely no idea what their child was planning to do.

So I don't think this result will lead to a slippery slope of all parents being convicted of their children's crimes merely by virtue of their having raised them - that isn't what happened in this case at all.

@Luckydog7 Fifteen year olds are not allowed to buy guns in that state.

The parents literally put a loaded gun in the hands of an unstable & hallucinating teenager. Then when the school called them in because he'd drawn a picture of a school shooting - and she knew he had the gun and ammunition - she still said/did nothing. She didn't tell them he had a gun.

I hope she gets all 15 years. That way she'll not be in a position to ruin any more children's lives.

The parents would be legally liable in the UK as well, which actually has stricter laws than the US in this regard.

OP, you (and many posters) have misunderstood the case. The legal grounds are being misreported. It's not just an arbitrary moral line like "not raising your kids well".

In the UK, in cases where 3rd parties have equipped or aided murderers, they have sometimes even been charged for the actual crime itself (eg murder, not manslaughter).

• Father bought son a gun as a gift shortly before shooting
• Parents ignored son's requests for mental health help
• On morning of shooting, parents cut short a school meeting about a disturbing drawing their son had made to go to work and declined to take the then 15-year-old home
• Despite mother texting someone that morning that she was afraid her son would do "something dumb"
• Mother said she "didn't feel comfortable" being responsible for securing the gun and left her husband to manage it

They could be liable on many grounds in the UK:

• Criminal: Accessory to murder
• Criminal: Charged for manslaughter
• Criminal: Charged for murder directly, especially if it was a crime pursuant to another crime (if father buying son gun was illegal in that state)

(The law on the above 3 is mixed up and has been a long-running debate – see Chan Wing Siu, Jogee, etc – that hinges a lot on interpretations of foreseeability, virtual certainty, etc... But either way the parents are in jail)

• Tort: Negligence of fiduciary duty of care

The reason the mother and not the father has been convicted is because the PARENTS themselves sought separate trials.

The mother tried to redirect all the blame to the father during her trial... The father is yet to be tried and will probably receive an even harsher sentence for being the one to buy his son a gun as a present.

Yabu - it’s absolutely the correct decision.

parents should be responsible and accountable for their children’s actions. Every time you hear of a youngster in the UK carrying out an awful act of violence, it always comes out in the wash that they have irresponsible parents afterwards.

Nearby where I live, an 11 and 13 year old tortured and murdered some animals a couple of years ago. There was an outcry by the public and I saw lots of ‘don’t judge the parents’ comments on local social media. It turns out that both sets of parents are failures, social services were already involved, they were known to the police etc. There was no consequence because of their young ages and they’re back on the streets terrorising the communities.

Her parents did not arm her and ignore that there were clear signs that a school shooting was possible, if not probable. And she is mot a minor.

Sounds like the conviction is fair considering her actions.
Thinking about the UK and knife crime, do parents ever get in trouble for knowing that their child carries a knife or supplying one knowingly? What if they bought a knife with money that you gave them ?

Is the killer likely to be getting mental health care in prison?

Because he was drawing it. Because school flagged up the danger. This was not unforeseeable.

Personally I don't think she should have been charged with manslaughter unless we're also charging the school for not checking that he had any weapons on him when they knew he was drawing 'disturbing' pictures or the gun shop for selling a gun to the father with a child present (although apparently children are welcome in gun shops even 3 year olds!) or the whole damn country for allowing deadly weapons to be sold out of shops in the first place.

I think what the parents should have been charged with was what they actually did which was buy a gun for a child (although I see now that buying a long gun for a child is actually legal in 30 states!) and for neglect for not addressing his MH issues. The child should have also been charged as a child as he was 15 when he committed the crime.

The parents are scapegoats here, if the US really wanted to stop this sort of thing happening they'd look at gun laws, not parents. By blaming the parents they move the focus away from what is really to blame.

Again the misconceptions are frustrating. This is not about child neglect.

This is a point of law that many people have been charged for. For example in the UK, there've been cases where a council house young adult gave someone aggressive in their gang/chav type circle a knife. When the person went on to murder someone, the 1st person was in some cases even liable for murder (not just involuntary manslaughter as in this case).

Simplifying it A LOT, elements to consider include chain of causation, intent (foreseeability = intent?), and if the 1st action was a crime (eg father buying son gun illegally), whether both actions can be grouped together as 1.

The exact charge is part of a long-running debate in UK common law but in ANY CASE, the parents would be in jail for something.

Blame the gun-fanatics who believe it is their inalienable right to bear arms
Sadly, it's always the ones with the least intelligence that shout the loudest

What do you think she should be charged with for illegally buying her underage and mentally unwell son a gun?

Bearing in mind that without her buying him the gun, he wouldn't have been able to kill those other children.

That doesn't fall under neglect.

What do you think would be an appropriate charge if not manslaughter? Accessory to murder?

OP, out of curiosity, do you agree with the charge of corporate manslaughter in the case of business owners who have been found guilty of very bad practice that has led to the death of a person? While this case is obviously very different of course, it's similar in a way that the parents foreseeable actions and lack of duty of care have led to their child killing 4 others.