PONTIAC, Mich. — A judge might rule Tuesday whether to keep accused Oxford High School shooter Ethan Crumbley at the Oakland County Jail rather than return him to a juvenile facility, a ruling that would run counter to national trends and a new federal law that took effect in December.
Oakland County Circuit Judge Kwame Rowe will consider a request by Crumbley's court-appointed attorney and court-appointed guardian that the 15-year-old be housed at Children's Village, a juvenile detention facility in Pontiac designed to provide a "therapeutic environment" for youths.
Crumbley was charged as an adult with 24 felonies, including terrorism and first-degree murder, in the Nov. 30 shooting that took the lives of four schoolmates — Hana St. Juliana, 14; Madisyn Baldwin, 17; Tate Myre, 16; and Justin Shilling, 17 — and injured six other students and a teacher. He faces up to life in prison without parole if convicted.
Prosecutors argued and 52-3 District Judge Nancy Carniak agreed in December that the magnitude of the crime and safety of other children at the juvenile home required that Crumbley be housed at the Oakland County Jail. Carniak said she believed Crumbley would pose a danger to other residents at Children's Village, where the county holds juvenile defendants.
But Paulette Michel Loftin, Crumbley's court-appointed attorney, argued that the teen would not be a menace to other residents, noting he had never been in trouble at the school prior to the shooting and had no disciplinary record.
Criminal justice advocates and some mental health experts said the practice of isolating juveniles in adult detention facilities can cause irreparable mental harm to youthful offenders. Crumbley is getting daily visits with a mental health professional at the jail, according to prosecutors.
Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald has said her policy has been to place juveniles at the juvenile facility, but the Crumbley case is an exception.
"Defendant is accused of calculating and premeditating the mass murder of other juveniles in a school setting," Marc Keast, chief of litigation with the Oakland County Prosecutor's Office, said in a Friday email to The Detroit News. "Placing him at a juvenile detention facility like Children's Village, surrounded by other juveniles, would be entirely inappropriate.
"The Oakland County Jail is the safe and appropriate environment, and his placement there properly balances the required criteria under federal law."
But juvenile advocates like Deborah LaBelle counter that age matters when deciding where to detain a juvenile, including Crumbley.
"He is a child accused of a very serious crime but has not been convicted of anything," said LaBelle, a Michigan human rights attorney who heads the Juvenile Justice Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. "Human rights law is very clear that you have to treat children as what they are: Children.
"Not what they did, but who they are."
Further complicating matters is a one-sentence notice of insanity defense filed last month in Oakland Circuit Court, which was signed by Crumbley's defense attorneys, Loftin and Amy Hopp.
Pursuing an insanity defense could hurt Crumbley's chances of being moved to the Children's Village, said William Amadeo of McManus and Amadeo in Ann Arbor, a defense attorney with a history of defending people with mental health issues.
“He could be deemed more of a threat to juveniles if they’re saying he’s incompetent,” Amadeo said. “It’s a brutal case and I have respect for the defense lawyers, but they’re going to have an uphill battle on this case.”
Incarcerating a 'child'
Children's Village is housing 81 children, with 37 of them in detention while awaiting trial for an alleged crime or serving a sentence, Oakland County spokesman Bill Mullan said Friday. The rest are children who are housed there due to homelessness or abuse or neglect at home.
"The detention kids don't mix with the abuse and neglect kids," Mullan said. "The detention kids do mix with each other. They go to school together and eat meals together.
"They just don't have any interaction with the non-detention kids."
At the jail, Crumbley has spent the majority of his time in a one-man cell. He remains under direct around-the-clock observation by an Oakland County Sheriff’s deputy, said Oakland County Undersheriff Curtis Childs.
The only time when he is permitted outside of his cell is for taking daily showers, making a phone call or having virtual visits, primarily by Zoom.
There are currently no juveniles charged with murder in Children's Village, Mullan said. But the facility has housed killers in the past.
The most high-profile was Nathaniel Abraham, who was convicted of murder as an adult in 1999 at the age of 13, for a crime committed when he was 11 years and 9 months old. Southfield attorney Geoffrey Fieger, who represented the boy, said at the time Abraham was the youngest American ever to have been convicted of murder as an adult.
Abraham was convicted of second-degree murder in the death of 18-year-old Ronnie Greene Jr., a stranger who was shot with a single bullet wound to the head with a stolen .22 caliber rifle.
Prosecutors portrayed the shooting as cold-blooded, premeditated murder, saying Abraham prepared by shooting balloons in the days prior to the shooting and bragged about it afterward.
Fieger brought in experts who said Abraham had the mental capacity of a 7-year-old and lacked the capacity to form intent. The lawyer also argued the gun was so old and battered it would have been impossible to deliberately shoot Greene in the head.
The judge sentenced Abraham under a law that provided an option for a blended sentence in both the juvenile and adult systems. The judge ruled that Abraham would be housed at Children's Village until the age of 21, at which time a judge would decide whether to free him or resentence him in the adult system.
Abraham was released on his 21st birthday in 2007 but was arrested in Pontiac 18 months later with 254 Ecstasy pills in a liquor bottle bag. He was sentenced to four to 20 years in prison and paroled in June 2017.
Abraham is back in prison after a 2019 conviction on 12 charges, including assaulting a police officer, maintaining a drug house, and multiple counts of delivery and manufacturer of methamphetamine. The earliest he can be released is late February 2025, according to state prison records.
A child is a child
In the case of Crumbley, the teenager legally is a child, regardless of being charged as an adult, juvenile advocate LaBelle said.
"Under the law, he's not a young man, he's still a child," said LaBelle, noting it's a legal definition for anyone younger than age 18.
Michigan lawmakers two years ago raised the age when a person must be charged as an adult from 17 to 18 years old.
McDonald said while she sympathizes with LaBelle's arguments, the concern about public safety requires adult incarceration for Crumbley.
“I agree with Deborah LaBelle, we should treat children like children, and I wish that we never had to house a juvenile at the jail," McDonald said in a statement to The News. "But I have to weigh and balance the concerns for this juvenile, for the other juveniles in the system, and for public safety. In this case, I believe that balance weighs in favor of his current placement.”
An additional argument the prosecutor's office has made against letting Crumbley return to Children's Village is the facility's security record and the potential difficulty in catching the teenager if he escaped.
In a Jan. 19 filing, McDonald's office said there have been eight escapes or walk-aways in the previous nine months at the facility.
“When a resident from Children’s Village absconds, staff are limited in what they can do,” according to the filing. The prosecutor's office noted that Children’s Village staff “cannot leave campus to pursue a juvenile” unless the child is under 12 or cognitively impaired. The facility's staff “will not give chase on campus if they have other youth with them,” according to the filing, and that no armed deputies guard the campus to prevent an escape.
Children’s Village is also a greater logistical challenge for court dates than the Oakland County Jail, where transport takes place through tunnels.
“That reduces any opportunity from escape, but it also protects the defendant,” the prosecutor’s office wrote.
Youthful offender trends
LaBelle said the number of youthful offenders housed in adult facilities has decreased dramatically over the past several decades, and Michigan is among a small minority of states that continue the practice. Michigan has five juveniles in prison, said Chris Gautz, a spokesman for the state Department of Corrections. All of them are male, Gautz said.
Children housed in adult jails are more likely to commit suicide, be assaulted by staff or attacked with a weapon than children housed in juvenile facilities, according to the Coalition for Juvenile Justice.
A 2018 report by the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic at the UCLA School of Law found that 89% of all youths housed in adult prisons in 2013 were held in 15 states, including Michigan, Indiana and Wisconsin. About a third of states held 10 or fewer youths in adult facilities, and seven states had no youthful offenders in adult jails at that time.
Under a change in the federal Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2018, youth are not to be detained in adult jails and lock-ups except for a few hours before and after a court hearing, temporarily in rural areas that don't have a juvenile facility, or when travel conditions are unsafe to transport the youth.
Federal laws set a high bar for housing a youth in an adult prison instead of juvenile detention, argued Jason Smith, executive director of the Ann Arbor-based Michigan Center for Youth Justice, in a Feb. 9 Detroit News commentary.
State law also requires, as of October, that only people 18 and older can be held in an adult jail.
An exception to federal law could be made if a judge finds that keeping a minor in an adult facility is "in the interest of justice," Smith wrote — a decision to be based on factors such as the offender's age, the circumstances of the charges, physical and mental maturity, and current mental state including the risk of self-harm.
A decision to house a youth at an adult facility would need to be reviewed at a court hearing every 30 days, with a 180-day limit unless there is "good cause" for an extension, Smith wrote.
"I think given the conditions under which (Crumbley) is allegedly being held, that it is unlikely the court could meet those requirements," LaBelle said. "Moreover, many of my youth clients, who were 16 years old and charged with first-degree murder, were held in Children's Village pretrial."
Juveniles in adult prisons
But McDonald's office contended she takes the proper detention for juvenile defendants seriously.
Since taking office in 2021, McDonald has reviewed dozens of cases in which juveniles were serving life sentences with no chance of parole for crimes committed before they were 18. The reviews were required after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that mandatory life without parole sentences violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.
McDonald has reversed the vast majority of the decisions, and there are now more than 20 juvenile lifers who have either been released or who now have a chance to be paroled someday.
LaBelle noted reforms occurred at Michigan's prisons following a 2013 lawsuit, Doe et al vs. Michigan Department of Corrections, that was brought on behalf of youths who alleged they suffered sexual abuse and other harms while housed in adult prisons.
Though sexual assault was never proven, the lawsuit in 2020 resulted in an $80 million settlement that included payments to victims as well as justice reforms. Measures were taken to address problems of segregation, discipline, use of force, staff training and the reporting and tracking of incidents of sexual abuse.
The reforms don't apply to city or county jails, but they can inform local policy, LaBelle noted.
Dr. Stuart Grassian, a Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, psychiatrist who formerly served on the Harvard Medical School faculty for more than 25 years, submitted a report on the effects of isolation on youthful offenders to the Washtenaw County Circuit Court on the behalf of plaintiffs in the Michigan Department of Corrections lawsuit.
Grassian said he had interviewed several hundred individuals who had been held in solitary confinement, including many adolescents held in isolation at adult prisons.
"Almost a third of the prisoners described hearing voices, often in whispers, often saying frightening things to them," Grassian reported. "There were also reports of noises taking on increasing meaning and frightening significance."
Grassian said he observed that isolation exacerbated psychiatric conditions in inmates who were previously diagnosed, but also resulted in new psychiatric disorders in prisoners who were previously undiagnosed.
Asked why a community that has suffered the trauma of a school shooting should care about the accused shooter's potential physical or mental suffering in jail, LaBelle said poor treatment can ultimately interfere with bringing the offender to justice.
"If we don't recognize the reality of the status — he's 15 — we can end up in the situation where he is no longer competent to stand trial," she said.
