Michigan prosecutors are charging a teen with terrorism in a deadly mass shooting at his high school. The unusual approach was made possible by a law enacted after the 9/11 attacks.
Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard said he “100%” backs the terrorism charge against Crumbley. “If you weren’t hit by a bullet, it doesn’t mean you weren’t terrorized that day and won’t have nightmares about the rest of your life — whether you’re a parent, a teacher or a student in that class,” he said.
In 2012, the Michigan attorney general’s office for the first time issued a terrorism charge after authorities apprehended a man who fired shots from his car at about two-dozen vehicles along the Interstate 96 corridor. The law more typically has been used to charge people with making terroristic threats, such as calling in bomb threats, said Matthew Schneider, a former federal prosecutor who is uninvolved in the case and who previously was the state’s chief deputy attorney general. In 2005, a Michigan teen accused of plotting a massacre at his Macomb County high school was convicted of threatening an act of terrorism and other charges in a county-filed case that appeared to be one of the first in the country to apply anti-terrorism laws to threats of school violence. “This is why we have this law. It’s for this type of case. This is not just a murder case,” Schneider said of this week’s slayings. “It’s going to terrorize a generation of these kids who were in the school. The impact is on thousands of people.”He said lawmakers who enacted the law were thinking of terrorism in the traditional sense in the months after 9/11. “But since that time it’s been used for other things,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that it’s being used improperly because it fits the elements. It fits the language of the statute.” Schneider likened the state law to the 1970 federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, which was written with the mob in mind but now helps prosecute “all kinds of things” including street gangs.with providing material support for terrorist acts in plots to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and attack the state Capitol.
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