Colin Gray hasn’t even been in prison a full week, and his lawyers are already trying to get him out of the conviction entirely. On Wednesday, his attorneys filed a motion asking for a new trial, arguing that the March verdict was “contrary to evidence,” “against the weight of the evidence,” and “contrary to law and the principles of justice and equity.”
That’s about as generic as post-conviction filings get. It’s the legal equivalent of throwing spaghetti at the wall before the real argument shows up in a longer brief. But the timing tells you everything. This isn’t a man who’s spent months quietly building an appeal. This is a man who got sentenced to 15 years last Thursday and had a motion drafted by the next Wednesday.
In March, a jury convicted Colin Gray on 27 counts, including second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, and cruelty to children, for his role in arming his son before Colt Gray walked into Apalachee High School and killed two students and two teachers.
Prosecutors didn’t argue Colin pulled a trigger. They argued he handed his fourteen-year-old an AR-style rifle after months of warning signs and that the warning signs were loud enough that a reasonable parent should have done something. Judge Primm put it about as plainly as a judge can. The warning lights were flashing brighter and brighter, and Colin didn’t get his son help and didn’t take away his access to guns. Fifteen years followed. And within days, his attorneys were back in front of the same court asking to undo it.
Buried in the defense’s case is the argument that Marcee Gray, Colt’s mother, bears more responsibility than Colin does. Their attorney Brian Hobbs has leaned on this since sentencing, pointing to jail calls where Marcee fed her son’s obsession with mass shooters after the fact, building him a “shrine,” reading him fan art, treating his notoriety like something worth celebrating. Honestly? I don’t disagree with that part. What she did after the shooting is genuinely grotesque, and if there’s a version of accountability that includes her, I’m not going to oppose it.
But that argument doesn’t get Colin Gray anywhere close to a new trial, and it sure as hell doesn’t undo what he actually did. Marcee’s post-shooting behavior is disturbing. It is also completely irrelevant to the fact that Colin Gray bought his 14-year-old son an assault rifle, put it in a house with a kid who’d already been flagged to law enforcement, and didn’t lock it up. Four people are dead because that gun was accessible. You can hold two things about Marcee Gray’s conduct and Colin Gray’s conviction, and neither one cancels the other out.
Then there’s the defense’s other favorite line, the one about Colt “hiding his true intentions” from his father. Sure, maybe he did. 14-year-olds hide things from their parents constantly. That’s not exactly a novel legal defense.
The difference here is that Colin Gray wasn’t looking very hard. This was a kid who’d already been interviewed by law enforcement over an online threat. A kid whose mother was pushing to get the guns locked away. A kid Colin still bought ammunition and a gun sight for, as a gift, after all of that had already happened. If your son is hiding something and you keep handing him the tools to act on it anyway, that’s not a defense. That’s the entire case against you.
This motion is going to go through the process it’s supposed to go through, and given that murder convictions in Georgia skip straight to the state Supreme Court, we might actually get a real answer on this faster than you’d expect. I wouldn’t hold my breath for it to change anything. But I’ll be watching it either way.
(Sources)
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