@noel.semple7 Dad of school shooter sentenced to 15 years. Fair, or no?
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Yesterday, in the US state of Georgia, Colin Gray was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment after a 2024 school shooting that left 4 people dead, which seems about right until you read that Colin Gray did not shoot anyone. He didn’t tell anyone to shoot anyone, and he had no idea that there was going to be a shooting at all.
It was his son, 14-year-old Colt Gray, who committed this atrocity, and Colt Gray was sentenced earlier this week to life imprisonment. Colin, the dad, was sentenced yesterday because he had failed to recognize and respond appropriately to some red flag behaviors from his son, and because he had given his son a hunting rifle at Christmas and failed to take it away like he really should have after some of those red flag behaviors from Colt.
Was this bad parenting?
Absolutely.
Should it be punished?
Absolutely.
But I just can’t see how 15 years could possibly be a proportionate penalty when people who commit actual murders, both in Georgia and in Canada, are often sentenced to 15 years or less. And if the system is not going to be proportionate, then it’s not going to impose time that suits the crime.
But what about deterrence?
Do these stiff penalties cause all parents to pay more attention and reduce the chance that they’ll ignore red flags the way Colin Gray did?
It doesn’t seem like it will.
Deterrence is real. People actually do avoid breaking the law because they don’t want to get punished. But if something is already illegal and it already has a serious penalty attached to it, all of the studies
suggest that ramping the penalty up further is not going to increase deterrence. If you want to increase deterrence, you’ve got to increase people’s perceived risk of getting caught. You’ve got to make sure that The punishment follows quickly and certainly after you are caught, and often you’ve just
got to help people avoid the illegal behavior in the first place when they don’t want to be breaking the
law either, but they may be careless or they may just not be focused on what’s necessary to stay on
the right side of the law.
I think that sentences like 15 years for careless parenting come from the gut. And they come from a deep, real human sense of fear and anger and desire for revenge after a horrible crime takes place.
And those are natural and virtuous human emotions. But everything the government does needs to come from the head and from the heart, not so much from the gut. We need to be taking steps that are actually going to minimize as much as humanly possible the chance of these things happening going forward.
And that means getting smart about deterring crime.
It means helping people stay on the right side of the law, and it means investing in a social safety
net and in our schools so that when kids fall through the cracks because their parents have screwed up, we’re not all put at risk because there’s other caring professionals who are there to catch that person before they fall through the cracks and become a threat to the rest of us.
Everything the government does needs to be evidence-based and rational, and these human emotions and responses need to be honoured and taken seriously, but they can’t drive policy because we’ll end up not only with punishments which are frankly grossly disproportionate and cruel and unusual, but we’ll end up with criminal justice policy that does not keep us safe in the long run.