I read recently a small story about a 15 year old high school student, Cody Webb, who was jailed for 12 days after the school identified him as having called in a bomb threat on the school. The only problem is, they mis-identified him because they forgot about the whole daylight savings time thing – he had actually called in one hour PRIOR to the bomb threat.
When he claimed he was innocent, the Principal – Kathy Carlton – replied “Well, why should we believe you? You’re a criminal. Criminals lie all the time.”
So, because “Criminals lie all the time”, this student was denied due process and wrongly jailed. Instead of listening and even attempting to verify what he was saying, Kathy decided to flip out and act on bad information without apparently double checking her information.
One of the commentors on the original posting, P1, had a good point:
The treatment of Cody reflected the result, and the intent of the Patriot act 1 & 2. Cody was deemed a terrorist and as a result, his rights were suspended. Is what happened to Him, what’s happened to others, whats going to happen to countless more, the absolute disrespect, humiliation, and utter disregard of Constitution O.K.? This is the Security we have been given in exchange for Liberty?
Here is the patriot act itself.
http://www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html
(I sent this post to the principle too..)
Now, I can understand that educational institutions have to take the security of their student body very seriously. The Virginia Tech incident yesterday highlights that for everyone. However, if they are going to have a student arrested because they believe he perpetrated a crime like this, they had better damn well have good quality evidence that it was that student.
I did my fair share of “bad” things in high school, and got caught for a lot of them. One incident in particular comes to mind that reminds me of this situation, with the exception that it was handled properly by the school. I had sent an inflamitory email to all of the students and teachers in the school (the school provided us with email accounts) from another students email address. He’d left himself logged in and I wanted to “teach him a lesson”. I then logged him out of the computer, and logged myself in to a different computer (I wasn’t going to be stupid and log myself into the same machine – I knew they’d instantly trace it back to me). Regardless of that safeguard, it wasn’t more than a few hours before I was called into the principals office to be questioned about the incident. I, being young and stupid, denied any involvement. They told me they KNEW it was me, and I kept denying. They had no real proof that it was me, though, just circumstantial evidence. They called in my friends and tried to get positive evidence that I had done it. My friends, even though they also knew I had done it, all denied any knowledge. Because of this, the school was never able to officially pin it on me, and I’ll give them credit – they never punished me for it. They knew I had done it, but when they could find no “smoking gun”, as such they didn’t punish me.
Did I deserve punishment? Yes, I did. I got what was coming to me, though, as a few weeks later I was shipped off to St. John’s Northwestern Military Academy in Wisconsin. Gotta love Karma…
feel free to email Kathy and let her know your thoughts – k.charlton@hempfieldarea.k12.pa.us
[tags] Individual Rights, Cody Webb [/tags]
One of my favorite quotes to quote, Earl Hickey’s understanding of karma: “Do good things, and good things happen. Do bad things, and bad things happen.”
I’m not sure I really believe it, but it’s still a cool quote
hey… earl hickey doesn’t lie!