Parental responsibility faces tough new test

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Parental responsibility faces tough new test

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Colin Gray faces ******* charges after his son allegedly shot four people *****

******* charges brought against the father of a US school shooter have ***** down a new marker on the issue of parental responsibility.

Colin Gray bought his son Colt an AR-style rifle for Christmas last year, even though the boy had been questioned by police just seven months earlier about online threats to commit a school *********.

Investigators suspect the 14-year-old may have used that same ******* on Wednesday when he shot ***** four people and wounded nine others at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia.

The teen has since been charged with ******* and – in an unprecedented move – so too has his dad.

Mr Gray, 54, faces two counts of second-degree *******, four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children.

Together, the charges carry a maximum penalty of 180 years in prison.

Can they make the charges stick?

The two ******* charges against Mr Gray apply to the two teenagers ******* in Wednesday’s rampage: ********** Angulo and Mason Schermerhorn, both 14.

Two Apalachee teachers – Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53 – also ***** in the *******.

The second-degree ******* charges now facing Mr Gray may be due to specific wording in Georgia law.

According to the state’s ********* code, a person commits second-degree ******* “when, in the commission of cruelty to children in the second degree, he or she causes the ****** of another human being irrespective of malice”.

With prosecutors bringing these charges barely more than 24 hours after the *********, experts caution that the facts are still emerging, and it ******** unclear what legal arguments will be directed at Mr Gray.

“There’s a connection between the deaths and ‘the commission of cruelty to children,'” said Evan Bernick, an associate law professor at Northern Illinois University.

“But is the cruelty directly arising from the *********, or is it cruelty to his son that may have led [the boy] to commit the *********? We just don’t know yet.”

The son will be tried as an ******, meaning that the ********* justice system will treat his ********* prosecution as that of somebody fully responsible for their own actions.

But that does not mean his father will escape punishment, Prof Bernick told the BBC.

The crux of the argument will be not that Colin Gray wanted the ********* to happen, but that he “******* to intervene, and his ******** to intervene was negligent in ways that justify treating him as part of the *********”.

“I gave him a big hug” – Parents reunite with kids after school *********

If he didn’t pull the trigger, why a ******* case?

Across the US, there are laws on the books to punish parents or guardians for everything from academic truancy and underage driving to shoplifting and vandalism.

But prosecutors in the state of Michigan expanded the reach of such statutes earlier this year when they secured dual convictions against the parents of another teen gunman.

James and Jennifer Crumbley were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to at least 10 years in prison for how their ********* negligence as parents contributed to their son Ethan, 14, ******** four of his classmates in 2018.

Thursday’s decision to charge the father with ******* – a far more severe charge – could again test the legal bounds of parental responsibility.

Eve Brank, a psychology professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, researches how the law intervenes and sometimes interferes with family decision-making.

In her view, the emerging concept of punishing parents after school shootings reflects broader frustration around US **** ********* and, in the absence of regulatory reform, the inability to curb the country’s unrelenting series of firearm incidents.

“It’s not like we’ve created a bunch of new laws to address these issues. They’re just being used, somewhat creatively, to address the issue,” she said.

“In terms of what the research shows, most people would agree there are a lot of influences on how children behave, not just their parents.”

But she noted that prosecutors in Georgia may be privy to information from the investigation not yet publicly available and may believe they can successfully argue that, like the Crumbleys before him, Colin Gray’s actions were particularly egregious.

Tim Carey, a law and policy adviser at the Johns Hopkins Center for **** ********* Solutions, argues that charging parents is also a reflection on weak **** safety policies.

Georgia has been “very apprehensive to **** ********* prevention policies”, he said, and prosecutors in such states may “feel confined to trying to bring a sense of justice or retribution after the fact, in part because they couldn’t prevent” such a tragedy.

“I saw a **** with a ****” – How Georgia school ********* unfolded

Where could punishing parents end up?

Some legal scholars worry that expanding the toolkit prosecutors can use after a ********* could have unintended consequences.

“We know we have a problem of ********* and guns in our society,” said Ekow Yankah, a law and philosophy professor at the University of Michigan.

“And instead of tackling it with systemic and regulatory powers, we soothe ourselves with these kind of extraordinary prosecutions.”

But, Prof Yankah warns, prosecutors are now armed with “a hammer” they can bring down on others, including poor families from ********* groups and single parents.

“School shootings are highly visible… but I’m worried about the cases that won’t make the news,” he said.

And while parents are now at greater risk of being penalised for their children’s violent actions, less progress has been made on the widespread access to firearms or on the availability of mental health resources for struggling kids.

“Our default response to very deep social problems in the ******* States is to bring in the apparatus of the ********* law,” said Prof Bernick.

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