Student Suspended Over IM Icon

Chris Reimer writes "C|Net News.com is reporting that a 15-year-old student lost a lawsuit over having an instant messenger icon that represented a death threat against an English teacher on his personal computer that another student reported to school authorities. From the article: 'His parents sued, claiming that the icon was protected by the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech, that the school district failed to train staff in proper threat assessment and that the school board violated state law in not following proper procedures. [The judge] Mordue rejected the free-speech claims.'"

Comments

what did he expect?

[conJunk]

from the court's opinion in tfa:

"Likewise, the surrounding circumstances--including the effect of the icon on Mr. VanderMolen and school officials, Aaron's awareness of the school's position that a threat was not a joke, the absence of any factor to suggest that the icon was a joke and the general increase in school violence--establish that an ordinary, reasonable recipient who is familiar with the context of the icon would interpret it as a serious threat of injury.

that's the only part of the decision i disagree with. an IM icon isn't a threat, it's an icon. "The absence of any factor to indicate the icon was a joke"? Um. How about that it's an icon, as opposed to say a note, or graffiti, or some other type of message?

that minor disagreement asside, by 15 a kid should know he can't make a picture of a gun pointed at a teacher's head, have blood splatter everywhere, write "kill teacher $name" and think nothing is going to happen.

I was in second grade when i learned you can get in trouble for drawing pictures of people you don't like lying in a hospital bed.

did the school over react by suspending him for a semster? probably. but good grief. you don't make icons of blowing a teacher's brains out and think that's totally cool.

Re:what did he expect?

[ackthpt]

that's the only part of the decision i disagree with. an IM icon isn't a threat, it's an icon.

This isn't the 1950's and the Cleaver's we're discussing here. There are in the past 20 years several accounts of perfectly normal children appearing at school one day to settle a few scores. Nobody sees these things coming, particularly parents. Parents who don't check up on who their children hang out with, don't engage in conversations to see how their day went, but are always shocked when they get a call from the police.

I worked in San Jose a few years ago and some joker took some pictures of himself with a bunch of guns and ammo and dropped them off at the local drug store for processing. An alert employee thought there was something wrong and reported the photos to the police. The guy had been driving past my office every day for months. Guns, explosives, pipe bombs, etc. Plans to kill people at his community college were found in his home. Free speech? Sometimes people have to take an interest. I'm seriously bugged Aaron's parents are defending this.

Re:what did he expect?

[Alien Being]

FTA:

"As a result, the school district sent Aaron's parents a notice of a formal disciplinary hearing and also tipped off the sheriff's department (which declined to do anything, concluding that the icon was indeed a joke). Meanwhile, a psychologist concluded that Aaron did not pose a threat."

Re:what did he expect?

[SuprCzr]

I disagree...

Just because ends do not solely justify means, does not mean that ends should not be a consideration, nor that ends cannot help to justify means.

That said, I do believe that narrowminded simplifications do not justify overrated posts.

Re:what did he expect?

[DougLorenz]

A problem with this line of reasoning is that we aren't talking about whether or not the kid committed a crime. The police decided that he did not, and chose not to arrest him for any crime.

However, what the kid did was a violation of school policy, and for that he was suspended, which is a valid punishment under the school policy.

This has nothing to do with prosecution of thought crimes or anything of that nature. There are certain things that you are not allowed to do in certain circumstances, even though those actions may be legal. Criminal law is not the only collection of rules that a person must follow.

Back the Judge?

[ackthpt]

Back the Judge?

Ok, most law is based upon common sense. You don't steal my car, I don't shoot you, we all get along sort of thing. Here we have parents backing up their child's poor taste chat icon. Seriously. There's the 1st Amendment, or whatever passes for guarantees of Free Speech in other countries, but where is this a political critique of the institutions of government? That's what the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution is there to protect. This is clearly a child behaving badly and parents backing him up. There's seriously something f**ked in the head with these people.

I'm behind the judge in this one. I'd even consider remanding the child to protective services as these parents are seriously a threat when they think this is find behaviour worthy of defending in court.

First Amendment?

[RandUser]

This seems pretty clear-cut: although the student _is_ free to say whatever he wants, a death threat supercedes being "protected" as far as actions from the school district. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from repercussions, and the kid/his parents are getting a pretty decent lesson in this.

Indeed.

[raehl]

Clearly the court prefers that you don't threaten people before you kill them.

Re:not the funniest joke

[LionKimbro]

I agree. This stuff isn't funny.

But you know, when I was 13, (which was pre-Columbine,) this sort of stuff was funny. Except only for kids.

Or was it?

My mom thought "Death Camp," a series of stories one of my friends wrote, in 7th grade, was pretty damn funny. She read each one, cover-to-cover. They were the story of a team of kids, who were imprisoned daily in a middle school, forced to eat terrible food, with mutant teachers trying to take over the kids minds. The kids amassed a ton of weapons (we were all playing Wasteland at the time, you see,) blew away the teachers, (who were shooting back, and conducting vile experiments on other students,) helped everyone escape, and then... ...took off in an SR-71 that happened to be parked on the 1/4-mile track?

At any rate: We had wonderful times coming up with the stories. We'd joke about them at lunch, and imagine how awesome it would be to finally get free of all that schooling. We'd egg on our star writer (my friend, who I shall not name, since he's actually around, writing on the Internet,) and he'd write out another episode in the story. It was 15 episodes total, I think, each around 4-6 pages long, typewritten out on computer.

We loved the stories. My mom thought they were cute.

And I really think there's something of value to the quest for freedom.

Now, come Junior year, Senior year in high school, we got the idea one lunch: "Oh! Let's re-read those old stories! Death Camp! Yah!" But, our friend told us, "No. I burned them."

"You burned them?!" "Yeah. I burned them." "But why?!"

"Because they were crap!"

And it's true. They were crap. But they were our crap, and we loved them. But, our friend just burned stuff after a year, generally; He was that sort of writer. "It's not good enough." (torch!)

Most of us are now well paid geeks. There's a stellar composer in our bunch. The author, despite graduating Pepperdine, and a number of other honors (including graduating Valadictorian from our high school) isn't doing so well; He's struggling with his English major, trying to figure out what to do with it.

But basically, we're all doing well, and we're all good people, and we're all contributing.

Now. Let me ask you. In the climate we see exhibited here today in this room (Slashdot.) In this room, of all places, ... Now, I ask you to consider where we would have been, if the world had been post-Columbine.

I can tell you where we'd be: Nowhere. It's quite plausible we wouldn't have graduated from High School. We might be busted for conspiracy to commit murder. Perhaps we'd be looked over for GATE. Our healthy anti-authoritarianism would likely become genuine fear, and have become an intense, focused, directed anti-authoritarianism.

Frankly, I don't think I'd be able to type this today.

Now, I'm feeling done, but I realize something's left to be addressed. I wish it were clear and obvious, and didn't need to be said. Unfortunately, apparently, it does: "No." "No, we never intended to actually kill our teachers." It was just a story. It was just fantasy.

It was a fantasy that we needed, in some ways. We knew that there were ideological battles taking place in the school, we knew that teachers were throwing ideas at us. We knew that we were being graded on whether or not we conformed with ideas that were not necessarily true. We knew that things were complicated. We did not have the language to describe the kinds of things we were intuited. But our brains knew that there was a conflict taking place, and so when our brains reified what we were seeing, it did it in the language of violence: A struggle to get out. A struggle to be free.

We could not wax poetic about "cognitive dissonance," we could not talk about "ontologies," or "paradox." But we felt it, we knew it, and so we wrote it.

May God bless today's kids: They're in a far deeper prison than we were.

Welcome to the 21st century

[Billly Gates]

"I'd even consider remanding the child to protective services as these parents are seriously a threat when they think this is find behaviour worthy of defending in court."

Back when I was in school (I am only 29) I remembered what happened if I screwed up in school and the teacher called my mother.

Boy, was I scared when dad came home and heard about it. I knew what was going to happen.

Today my gf is a school teacher and rarely if ever do the parents ever discipline the kid. Almost always in this day and age the parent will always standup for the kid and attack the teacher for letting it happen. No one believes in responsibility and everything is always someone elses fault. Its like a character flaw if its your own. I wonder if this is why America is so law suit friendly? Its always someone elses fault and its liek this because we raise our kids to think that.

My gf suspended 2 students for threatening her life. One was expelled and a gang leader and came into the school with a knife with the intention of stabbing her as a way to teach her a lesson by suspending her. Meanwhile she complained to her boss who did nothing and then to the principal who got hte kid out. Meanwhile she is now unemployeed for dare defending herself because it made her boss look bad by going around him. Sigh

I do not mean to sound like a dick but teachers get paid too little and put up with too much garbage to deal with trash. She had to get her masters and 2 certifications and $100,000 in debt just to have the priviledge of putting up with gang bangers and death threats for a mere $39,000 a year.

I do find this odd it happened outside of school grounds but still.