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Daylight Savings Time Puts Kid in Jail for 12 Days
Jherek Carnelian writes "Cody Webb was jailed for calling in a bomb threat to his Hempstead Area high school (near Pittsburgh). He spent 12 days in lockup until the authorities realized that their caller-id log was off an hour because of the new Daylight Savings Time rules and that Cody had only called one hour prior to the actual bomb threat. Perhaps it took so long because of the principal's Catch-22 attitude about Cody's guilt — she said, 'Well, why should we believe you? You're a criminal. Criminals lie all the time.'"
Feel free to tell his principal how you feel about the whole guilty until proven innocent thing she has going on.
k.charlton@hempfieldarea.k12.pa.us
There is a war going on for your mind.
Yes. I hope they nail them for wrongful imprisonment; and hopefully find a way to add kidnapping charges on top of it.
And not that this isn't just 12 days for the kid. It will have a lasting effect on his whole life. And no, I'm not exaggerating. Remember how even the pretend jail for 6 days in the Stanford Prison Experiment had life-long-lasting effects on much older kids than this guy.
I hope the kid and his parents sue and get rewarded as well as seeing criminal charges that get the people who did this to him locked up.
There is a more detailed account of the story here.
Read any good sonnets lately?
I live in the area and have known about this story for a week or two...
We was calling to see if school had been canceled due to weather. He called an hour before or after the bomb threat. When they matched the phone records versus the actual time of the call they found his number erroneously because of DST problems and the time difference.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I know it's not really the point of your story, but in case it comes up again, the main reason that most of our buildings are generally rectangular is because it's much easier(read: cheaper) to build them that way.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
http://www.hempfieldarea.k12.pa.us/webdir/charlton /index.htm
"Well, why should we believe you? You're a criminal. Criminals lie all the time."
That's no catch-22. A catch-22 is a situation whereupon two actions are dependent on one another. A chicken-or-the-egg sort of thing. This quote is close, but it's not a catch-22.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22_(logic)
Sorry to pick a nit.
Or give her boss a call.
Dr. Terry J. Foriska
Assistant Superintendent of Secondary Education
E-mail: terry.foriska@hempfieldarea.k12.pa.us
Office Phone: (724) 850-2232
Fax: (724) 850-2089
Dr. Terry J. Foriska has more than 25 years of experience in public education. He is in his fourth year as Assistant Superintendent of Secondary Education for the Hempfield Area School District. Prior to joining Hempfield, he was Assistant Superintendent for the Gateway School District in Monroeville. He has held administrative posts in several other school districts in Allegheny, Washington and Westmoreland counties. He began his education career as a teacher in the Mt. Pleasant Area School District.
About Dr. Foriska
Dr. Foriska holds a master's degree from the University of Pittsburgh and a second master's degree from Duquesne University. He earned his doctorate of education degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1991. He conducted his doctoral research on the topic of student learning styles and received national recognition for his work. He went on to specialize in the areas of curriculum, instruction and assessment, and is frequently invited to share his expertise at the state and national level.
He has served on the Learning Styles Network, a national board of educators devoted to raising awareness of how students learn. Over the years, Dr. Foriska has also served on several committees and task forces formed by the Pennsylvania Department of Education to share successful processes, products and philosophy for improving education.
Dr. Foriska has published numerous articles in both state and national education publications. He is also the author of four books.
He has received many awards for his work, including the "Outstanding Research and Publication Award " presented by the Pennsylvania Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. He is the only two-time recipient of this award.
try, convict and punish on less than complete evidence
Leave it to the lawyers and courts, please.
Because that's what they do best!!!
PERL:
All of the power of Voodoo with most of the understandibility!
*cough* libel.
It was Hempfield Area High School, not "Hempstead". Also, a link to a story that actually works: story time
More than that, how do you double the height of a dome? Yep, you make it twice as wide. How do you double the height of a straight-sided building? You make the walls stronger. Straight-sided buildings make better use of airspace, and so make better use of the surface area of our planet.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
A more reputable source (namely the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review) confirms this: "charged with a felony count of threatening to use weapons of mass destruction and misdemeanor counts of making false alarms."
this is actually the perfect example of begging the question. contrary to popular opinion, "begging the question" does not mean "demanding that the question be asked." it is a form of logical fallacy in which you assume what you are trying to prove.
using the fact that someone was accused of a crime to discredit their defense of that crime is a prime example of begging the question.
the example of "a catch-22" from the book catch-22 is the following: if a pilot is crazy, he will not have to fly more missions (since he will be placed on medical leave). if a pilot does not want to fly more missions, he is not crazy (since he values his own life, therefore he has to fly more missions). so if you're not crazy, you fly more missions. if you say you are crazy, the army assumes you are just trying to save your own life, therefore you are not crazy, and therefore you still fly more missions. that's the quick summary, anyway.
While I beleave the principal should be harshly reprimanded, perhaps even dismissed I don't think emailing her will help. What would be great though is the email address of the people will be making those sort of decisions about this Principals future employment so I can tell them what I think.
Perhaps the Principal getting fired is a bit extreme. But perhaps not. What she did to this kid was horrible. She railroaded him so she could get her man. Guilty with no chance to prove innocence (based on the TFA at least). That is inexcusable.
On the other hand, lets take a look at the police reaction. Did they just take what the Principal said at face value or did they try to look into the "facts" as well. If they didn't look into everything then they are guilty of negligence along with the Principal.
Jeez, what a troll. If you actually care at all about this case then look it up somewhere that has a tad more credibility and journalistic competence than the kind of sub-blog news source given in the summary:
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
What makes you think they didn't? If you look the case up almost anywhere other than the crappy source linked in the summary, you'll find that they did indeed have an attorney. It still took twelve days to get the charges (of threatening to use weapons of mass destruction, no less) dropped, and then the state authorities tried to have him held for a psychiatric evaluation because he had refused to admit to the charges.
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
Wrong. For example, Bisher al-Rawi was arrested while on a business trip to the Gambia:
Furthermore, Bush long refused to accept that the Guantanamo detainees should be considered prisoners of war, until the Supreme Court told him otherwise.
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
Here's another story of dumb principals - A school prefect has been banned by the principal from attending the final year prom simply because she refused to attend after-hours revision sessions. This is despite the fact she got
straight A's.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Not according to this article. They did have a lawyer, who managed to get him released to their custody before charges were dropped. It's not clear why it took 12 days to do it, but they didn't believe the principal over their son.
The family's lawyer is quoted a number of times in the article as well.
That a judge said "Well, why should we believe you? You're a criminal. Criminals lie all the time."
It was the principal, not a judge, that made that statement. Read the article again and go with the known facts.
It's Godwin's Law, and it never said that the one to bring Nazis into the argument lost, just that as the size of an argument increases, it is more likely that someone will bring up the Nazis.
FC Closer
I never heard of getting stopped for that reason. Nobody ever stopped me when I had my crapmobile. The cops probably figured that if I was driving that POS, I couldn't afford drugs.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Technically, he could have been out a lot quicker had his parents hired a lawyer and bailed him out, but the parents probably believe the police and thought he did it too. They might have even told the cops to keep him in there to teach him a lesson! who knows. Point being, yes he was in jail but not because he was guilty until proven innocent.
s /westmoreland/s_501066.html
Technically, his parents did hire a lawyer:
"The teen said he did call the school's delay hot line early Sunday, March 11. But that was an hour before the bomb threat was phoned in, said the family's attorney, Tim Andrews. After Webb's parents obtained his cell phone records, Andrews found the call times did not match."
"Webb's parents, Linda and Budd Webb, arrived at the school and listened to the recorded bomb threat. Linda Webb told administrators it wasn't her son."
"He was released to his parents' custody that day after Westmoreland County Common Pleas Judge John Driscoll continued the hearing when the state police failed to appear."
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribunereview/new
I don't understand where your numbers come from. Firstly, it would make no sense to use the parents' income in place of the son's, since they weren't behind bars and thereby lost no income. Secondly, if we do assume they could, and we do assume an income of 30-50k, we're looking at $100-200 per day. So, for 12 days, we arrive at $1200-2400 lost, meaning they could sue for a whopping $2400-4800 based off of income. Remember, it is *lost* income that they get to sue for.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
Yes, because dashing off emails from a random /. flamewar is really going to represent well-reasoned, well-informed concern for a situation that truly has impacted the authors of those e-mails, rather than just thousands of morons in need of a Satyagraha du jour screaming "UR TEH SUXX0RZ!!! LOL!!" from behind cubicle walls a thousand miles away who in reality couldn't care less and will have forgotten this story by this time tomorrow.
There's a reason, for instance, that FARK has a standing policy of deleting such incitements and banning the offending user from posting. It's not political activism, it's just harassment.
Enter the sheeple...
Guantanamo Bay does not have a prison, it is a detention facility for enemy combatants.
If you're locked up in a cage and can't leave, the semantics are irrelevant from your point of view.
Guantanamo Bay had released more than half of those who have come through its doors and is one of the most transparently operated detention facilities in the world.
What you just wrote should have scared you after you proof read your post. Some of these innocent "detainees" or "guests of the US government" have been imprisoned for years before release. Some were as young as 12. Is that the behavior of a just and open society?
The people in Guantanamo weren't just picked up off of the streets as suspects in criminal investigations...
Wrong, some were "Jerry Springers" as the troops call them. The US was paying bounties for terrorism suspects and some people just turning in guys they had grudges against.
Maybe you need to stop consulting the military on the rationale for their own wrong-doing. Guantanamo will go down in history as a blight on our record for protecting freedoms just like Japanese detentions. I just hope the Japanese weren't being tortured.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Really? Did the US Congress make a declaration of war at some point that I missed out on? Because my reserve unit seems to have forgotten to call me up to say, "We're goin' to war, Devil Dog, oorah! Report for duty in 24 hours. Semper Fi." If you're speaking of Bush's "War on Terror" that he begins and ends every other sentence with, that's called a figure of speech and has no legal backing no matter how many times he repeats it. Even if it did, it wouldn't suddenly make it acceptable to indefinitely detain people with no known connection to terrorist groups, including foreign nationals who were simply visiting some area where we happen to have some troops stationed, or in some cases were kidnapped from an adjacent area and turned in by others.
You should probably watch something besides Fox News every now and then. You might become a little less ignorant yourself. The established facts (as reported by crazy, liberal, non-Fox News stations like NPR and the BBC) are that the US military/government has been in the habit of offering rewards for the capture of "terrorists". Many of the people who have languished in the black box called Guantanamo (not allowing any communication or even access to a lawyer does not rhyme with the word "transparent") were simply random people scooped up off the street by Afghani warlords and such and turned in to the local US military posts for cash money. What makes this infinitely worse is that the military has already admitted many times that a large portion of the inmat--sorry, "detainees" have no actual evidence against them whatsoever beyond someone saying, "this guy is a terrorist, gimme some money". None, zip, zero, nada, el zilcho. They weren't keeping the evidence under wraps for security reasons, they simply didn't have any in many cases. That's already been established, from their own mouths. And yet they "detained" these people for literally years, and continue to do so, EVEN AFTER running their own investigations and finding no evidence with which to place charges. Worse yet (I know, how could it get worse!), they have done their level best to block all attempts at providing these unaccused (unaccusable!) persons with any due process, even though many have never been proven to be terrorists or enemy combatants or even that they were ever present near a location that any combat took place. The worst serial murderer/bomber/rapist/child molester gets at a minimum a chance to talk to a lawyer and due consideration by a court of law. These people got nothing. For years.
You admit yourself that they have already released many people, finally, after really having no choice due to continuing public and legal pressures. Obviously they aren't going to be releasing actual proven terrorists anytime soon, so who are all those people? There are hundreds of people in Gitmo, yet more than half have simply been released? Do you even have a functioning brain beyond the part that regulates your automatic
Specifically I was proving to my buddy how insecure the locker locks were. Not that I had a reputation for breaking into things and/or lying, just picked a damn unlucky locker to pop open. But pragmatically I broke in, then discovered the VCR, hence my open admission of B&E, though the VP didn't care or register that, she could have just used that against me with or without the VCR. Her fixation on the VCR ultimately saved my ass as the cop(s) realized that I was scared enough and there was no case on the point of VCR.
-nB
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I have to leave so I'll reread your post in full later, but just skimming over this phrase is an incorrect statement: "not allowing any communication or even access to a lawyer does not rhyme with the word "transparent"
There are over 1,000 lawyers for the 300 or so people being detained. And for the record I don't watch Fox news.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
When he was initially being accused his parents came to the school and the tape of the bomb threat was played for them. According to them, they both told the principle that the voice on the recording was not that of their son. The principle disregarded them and called the police. So pretty much from the get go the parents believed that their son was not guilty.
http://kdka.com/topstories/local_story_094135948.
Even if you want to cast doubt on his story, how about Khalid El-Masri? The guy who was detained in Macedonia for having a the same name as a terrorist, kidnapped using "extraordinary rendition," held for months and then dumped on a desolate road in Albania (too embarrasing to release him with an apology or any acknowledgement of their mistake).
This debacle resulted in a lawsuit and a costly souring of German-US relations. He was cleared of all charges and by all accounts it was a mistake. Are you going to defend that mistake too? This wasn't some "No-fly" list inconvenience of a few hours, this involved torture and violations of international extradition laws.
"The following concerns a question in a physics degree exam at the University of Copenhagen:
"Describe how to determine the height of a skyscraper with a barometer."
One student replied:
"You tie a long piece of string to the neck of the barometer, then lower the barometer from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground. The length of the string plus the length of the barometer will equal the height of the building."
This highly original answer so incensed the examiner that the student was failed immediately. The student appealed on the grounds that his answer was indisputably correct, and the university appointed an independent arbiter to decide the case.
The arbiter judged that the answer was indeed correct, but did not display any noticeable knowledge of physics. To resolve the problem it was decided to call the student in and allow him six minutes in which to provide a verbal answer that showed at least a minimal familiarity with the basic principles of physics.
For five minutes the student sat in silence, forehead creased in thought. The arbiter reminded him that time was running out, to which the student replied that he had several extremely relevant answers, but couldn't make up his mind which to use. On being advised to hurry up the student replied as follows:
"Firstly, you could take the barometer up to the roof of the skyscraper, drop it over the edge, and measure the time it takes to reach the ground. The height of the building can then be worked out from the formula H = 0.5g x t squared. But bad luck on the barometer."
"Or if the sun is shining you could measure the height of the barometer, then set it on end and measure the length of its shadow. Then you measure the length of the skyscraper's shadow, and thereafter it is a simple matter of proportional arithmetic to work out the height of the skyscraper."
"But if you wanted to be highly scientific about it, you could tie a short piece of string to the barometer and swing it like a pendulum, first at ground level and then on the roof of the skyscraper. The height is worked out by the difference in the gravitational restoring force T =2 pi sqr root (l
"Or if the skyscraper has an outside emergency staircase, it would be easier to walk up it and mark off the height of the skyscraper in barometer lengths, then add them up."
"If you merely wanted to be boring and orthodox about it, of course, you could use the barometer to measure the air pressure on the roof of the skyscraper and on the ground, and convert the difference in millibars into feet to give the height of the building."
"But since we are constantly being exhorted to exercise independence of mind and apply scientific methods, undoubtedly the best way would be to knock on the janitor's door and say to him 'If you would like a nice new barometer, I will give you this one if you tell me the height of this skyscraper'."
The student was Niels Bohr, the only Dane to win the Nobel Prize for physics."
This is allegedly an Urban Legend according to Snopes, but it's no less good for it
Source:
http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/barometer.asp
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.