DIARY CONVICTS SCHOOL-SHOOTER PARENTS BUT WILL VERDICTS STAND?
ETHAN CRUMBLEY'S DIARY WAS KEY EVIDENCE THAT CONVICTED HIS MOTHER JENNIFER AND FATHER JAMES BUT APPEALS COURTS QUESTION DIARY EVIDENCE
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The first successful criminal prosecution of a school-shooters' parents is largely based on diary entries the shooter made alleging they ignored his requests for mental help.
“I want help but my parents don’t listen to me so I can’t get any help,” Ethan Crumbly, then 15, alleged in his diary. “I have zero help for my mental problems and it’s causing me to shoot up the fucking school."
In admitting these entries into evidence at the parents' trials, the judge presiding over the case seriously risks being reversed on appeal because American courts generally reject the use of diaries as evidence—especially against someone other than the author of the diary.
Famously, the judge presiding over the prosecution of O.J. Simpson ruled that his murdered wife's diaries accusing him of abuse could not be admitted at his trial because they were "inadmissible hearsay."
Jennifer and James Crumbley were convicted after separate trials of four counts of manslaughter for each of the four teenagers their son, Ethan, shot to death at Oxford High School in Michigan on Nov. 30, 2021. Oakland County Circuit Court Judge Cheryl Matthews allowed prosecutors to use Ethan's sick and twisted 22-page diary against them.
The jury's foreperson told NBC's TODAY Show the diary "played a huge part" in convincing jurors to find Ethan's mother guilty.
Jennifer was convicted Feb. 6. James was convicted on Thursday.
Both face up to 15 years in prison for each of the charges they were convicted of when they’re sentenced by Judge Matthews. If given consecutive sentences for each conviction, they could be sentenced to 60-years, each.
James, 47, bought the gun, a 9mm pistol, four days before the Nov. 30 shootings. Jennifer took Ethan shooting the next day. In a Nov. 27 social media post, she wrote it was a “mom and son day testing out his new Christmas present,” the Associated Press reports.
In the same diary Ethan accuses his parents of ignoring his requests for treatment, he acknowledges his father hid the gun.
"I will have to find where my dad hid my 9mm before I can shoot the school," he wrote.
But the juries in both trials did not hear that evidence because Judge Matthews ordered it be excluded—even though she admitted into evidence the allegations made by Ethan in the same diary that his parents ignored his pleas for help.
In school the morning before the shooting, Ethan’s math teacher saw him draw a picture of a gunshot victim on an assignment. Equally disturbing words accompanied the disturbing art: “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me. The world is dead. My life is useless.”
School officials immediately removed Ethan from class and summoned his parents to the school for a meeting about Ethan. School officials never searched Ethan's backpack. This even though the Supreme Court has given school officials the legal authority to search students and their effects on school grounds.
At the meeting, James talked to his son, encouraged him to "talk to" his school counselor, to write in his journal and to talk to him. School officials "suggested" they take their son home, but Jennifer said they couldn't because they both had to work. They left, the school let Ethan go back to class.
Two hours later, he pulled the pistol out and started shooting.
Ethan was charged as an adult, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
“I am a really bad person. I’ve done terrible things,” Crumbley said when he was sentenced. "I really am sorry for what I’ve done."
Ethan refused to testify at either of his parents' trials. That meant he could not be cross-examined by his parents' lawyers either. The allegations Ethan made in his diary that they ignored him went untested.
New York's highest court, its Court of Appeals, explained why courts approach the use of diaries as evidence with caution.
"There is a wide gulf between thought and act, especially conduct of a murderous sort," the court wrote in 2014. It's neither "acceptable" nor "logical[]" to assume "a defendant has done the thing of which he is accused simply because in some temporally remote context he has had thoughts of such things."
In an earlier case, the court rejected admitting an alleged "bookie's" diary.
The most infamous diary in court history of all, Fanny Hill's fictional Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, was ruled constitutionally protected by the Supreme Court in 1966. In 1944, not even a war-time Supreme Court was convinced pro-Nazi diary entries by a German-American were enough to revoke his naturalized citizenship.
These cases involved the use of diaries against the author of the diary—not against someone alleged to have done something criminal in the diary.
In 1989, a Virginia appellate court was confronted with the case of a man accused of sexually abusing his 14-year-old daughter. After she committed suicide by jumping in front of a train, police discovered her diary in which she accused him of being an "incestive molesting jerk."
The trial court admitted the diary, but the Virginia Court of Appeals ruled that was error and vacated the conviction.
The legal problem is that the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment grants every criminal defendant the right to confront their accuser. Using a diary of the accuser without the accuser being subjected to cross-examination violates this right—like a Canadian appeals court found in reversing the conviction of Canada’s Natural Born Killer chick .
The one court diaries are welcomed in are military tribunals.
The federal court of appeals overseeing the trial of accused terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay has approved their use in the proceedings there.
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