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California High Schooler Changes Grades After Phishing Teachers, Gets 14 Felonies for His Efforts (gizmodo.com)
Police in Concord, California arrested a teenager earlier this week and charged him 14 felony counts after discovering the high schooler launched a phishing campaign directed at teachers in order to steal their passwords and change grades. From a report: The 16-year-old student, whose name was not released because he's a minor, was arrested Wednesday following an investigation launched by local law enforcement, with assistance from a Contra Costa County task force and the US Secret Service, KTVU reported. Reports of the hack first started to trickle into police two weeks ago, when teachers in the Mount Diablo Unified School District started receiving suspicious emails in their inbox. As it turns out, they were part of a phishing attempt launched by the student. The email messages contained a link that sent the recipients to a fake website constructed by the student to look like the school's portal. If a teacher clicked on the link, they were directed to the site that would prompt them to enter their username and password. The site would record any information entered, allowing the student to hijack the teacher's account.
That's almost 5 days' worth of felonies. Too bad 'zero tolerance' replaced 'let the punishment fit the crime.'
If he's lucky, the FBI will hire him and get him a shorter/commuted sentence.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
A felony is a massive life-altering consequence that is not necessarily the most useful way to address or punish a problem. The kid's sixteen. Would you charge a kid with sixteen felonies for opening a teacher's grade book and turning an F into an A with an old-fashioned pen? The fact that he used computers to do it shouldn't increase the punishment.
If he just raised random people's grades (so as not to point only to himself), it might have slipped by un-noticed. But students who got lower-than-expected grades would likely complain, causing an investigation. Hoist by his own petard, so to speak.
Should we ruin his life with 14 felonies over it? Nope. He needs a slap in the hand and some direction, not serious jail time and a record. Unpaid community service conducting teacher training on cybersecurity and Internet hygiene would be about right.
But 'murkah and harsh "justice."
The fools that charge the kid with felonies risk putting a talented hacker onto a road to a life of crime by introducing him to real felony criminals in prison, if it went that far. While his hacks were easily reversible, they should show some respect for his skill at exposing the ignorance of this teachers, and put him on a good path and not possibly in prison, by forcing him to teach teachers how to avoid the folly that they fell for. This is the epitome of a victimless crime.
But if anyone who's likely to be called to jury duty on the case is reading this, some advice:
nullify.
Nullify.
NULLIFY.
Not that it's likely to get that far in a juvie case, but still ... remember that it's always your right to judge the law as well as the case.
I used a keylogger entered into the machine with physically blocked ports via crashing the teacher app to DOS by entering a password longer than 255 characters then using "COPY CON: KL.COM" and ALT-numpad entered machine code from my notebook to copy the next characters typed (which would be the next teachers password) to high memory for me to retrieve later.
I only used it to lower bullies grades, not boost my own.
I'm really tempted to wear an "Uryjay Ullificationay" T-Shirt to jury selection, but I don't want to spend time in jail for contempt of court. :(
Evidently he wasn't hacking to learn.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"Uryjay Ullificationay"
lol. I had to look that up on Google and realized what it was when Google asked me if I meant "Jury Nullification"!
Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
"Mount Diablo Unified School District"
He was clearly going through hell.
Completely off topic trivia: From the summit of Mt Diablo (Devil's Peak) in Concord CA, you can see more of the earth's surface than anyplace else on earth with the sole exception of the summit of Mt Kilimanjaro. Like Kilimanjaro, Mt Diablo is an isolated peak, surrounded by vast flat surfaces (California's Central Valley to the East, and San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean to the West). You can see roughly 80,000 sq miles on a clear day.
Keep in mind these are 14 felony *charges*, not convictions. Prosecutors always go for the maximum they can charge so defendants can plea-bargain down to something more reasonable. Although a court date is set, it will probably be settled in a plea bargain and never go to a jury trial. Given how it's the kid's first offense and the lesser gravity of the "crimes" (altering grades is less serious than stealing money, copyright infringement, or NSA documents), the actual convictions will probably be plea bargained down to misdemeanors and the kid will probably be slapped with a hefty fine (which his parents will be on the hook for, as he is a minor), do some non-trivial community service time, and have restrictions placed on his internet access for a period of time (maybe 1-2 years). Worst case: the prosecutor is an overzealous asshole and wants to make an example of the kid. If so, the poor kid's life is seriously f**ked.
Prosecutors always go for the maximum they can charge so ... it will probably be settled in a plea bargain and never go to a jury trial.
You don't think maybe there is a problem with the legal system when this is a thing? That prosecutors have a tool they can use to avoid having to prove their cases? That they not only have the will to do this, it is basically standard operating procedure at this point?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Sadly, it pretty much is standard operating procedure anymore. I recall a quote about the justice system where somebody said that plea bargains aren't just a part of the justice system, they ARE the justice system. It isn't hard to see why that is. It takes time and money to schedule a judge, assemble a pool of potential jurors, select 12 from that pool to be on the jury, hold the trail to determine guilt, and then hold another court session for sentencing. The criminal justice system would quickly grind to a halt if every alleged criminal got a jury trial even if that is his/her constitutional right. I don't like the over-reliance on plea bargaining either, but that is the reality of what the criminal justice system has become.
Should we ruin his life with 14 felonies over it? Nope.
I completely agree - this should be handled internally by the school. However, if parents are going to use the courts to stop their kids being punished by schools then it's not surprising that schools have ended up having to use the courts to punish students. Courts are not at all designed to cope with misbehaving schoolkids and the result is that either they get off scot-free or they end up with life-ruining consequences.
https://www.bop.gov/about/faci...
People need to stop thinking that what you see about prison in movies or TV (even reality TV) is the norm.
Nobody is arguing that he should not be punished it is the severity of the punishment that is in question. A badly behaved schoolkid changing a few internal school grades is not the sort of thing a court is designed to deal with. You cannot achieve justice in schools through the court system: either kids will get off without any punishment or they end up with extremely serious consequences. What is needed is serious, but not life-changing consequences so they have a chance to learn from their mistakes.
I bet that the teacher is not going to be at least reprimanded for being stupid enough to be phished by a kid.
This is why security doesn't work. Being stupid is not being punished.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
yawn, nobody with half a brain pipes user input directly into sql queries these days...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
1. Would you trust a teacher who is very obviously too stupid to be smarter than a kid to punish someone properly who already showed that he can best his teacher?
2. Even the best IT infrastructure doesn't keep an idiot from entering his credentials into a fake website. If your user is too stupid to read an URL, you're SOL.
3. If you require a flash drive to actually convict a 16 year old, your police force isn't much better than the teacher when it comes to IT.
4. Yes, this is going to solve anything. "Making an example to deter" has worked so greatly for killing people for murder, hasn't it?
5. The tools are useless if the ones supposed to teach with them are unable to even use them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No kidding. 14 felonies for this? As a teenager, I too phished my teacher (and much of my class) successfully for their passwords by making a mock DOS prompt that mimicked basic commands and the login program. To be fair, I didn't do anything "evil" with it - as part of my final project, I actually encoded the teacher's username and password into stereogram with a generator that I wrote ;) She found it amusing. I'm sure she wouldn't have found it so amusing if I had been in there changing grades or whatnot. But 14 felones for a teenager acting up is just insane.
I'll consider these charges fair when they start charging high school bullies who beat up other students with 14 counts of assault.
"WANTED: Sinking ship seeks rats."
And can't stop bringing it up at every turn? Yeah, that's totally a sign of high self worth.
99% of teens age 16 are assholes sometimes. Punishing them for life would almost guarantee them to become assholes most of the time.
Bueller. Bueller. Bueller.
Mind you, he never got caught.
Have these law enforcers gone completely mad? They charged a fucking schoolboy with 14 "felonies" for cheating on his grades. That's an outrageous abuse of office. I say let the little boy off, and lock up the deranged & dangerous law enforcer who laid those preposterous charges.
That there is even a small chance a schoolboy might be tossed in the Gulag for cheating on his grades, brings the Law itself into ridicule and disrepute.
How do you know it was even possible to legitimately get good grades?
"Mount Diablo Unified School District"
He was clearly going through hell.
If school is so messed up that hacking seems easy...it doesn't seem fair to flunk people who are clearly smarter than what public school is intended for. If this guy had spent all his time doing schoolwork he would not have had those real skills, he would just be another kid who passed geography but doesn't know what a continent is.
You mean a good little dumb cunt that will go get a shit job for low pay and not complain? That's what they're trying to churn out en masse.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
The US system lacks a sense of proportion.
That describes most everything about America a good proportion of the time. We spend more on our military than the next 8 largest military budget combined despite there being no objective reason to do so. We spend more on our health care than anyone else and get worse results. We spend more on prison than anyone else and get worse results. We went to the moon just to to beat the Russians for bragging rights and haven't gone back since. Whether something actually works or not never seems to dent the consciousness of our "leaders".
Prisons help some by keeping criminals off the street
Not when you put FAR more people into the prisons than necessary. The notion that more prisons = fewer criminals is good politics but terrible policy.
Ah, the good 'ol days :) I also did a couple cases of software cracking, although I never distributed my cracks. I think one was Framsticks, because I was a giant nerd. Just the old fashioned stuff - look for known strings in the disassembly, look for where they're referenced, and start randomly messing with all the jump statements in the vicinity until the registration code breaks and lets you past ;)
Now we're just boring adults reminiscing. How did we become our parents? :
"WANTED: Sinking ship seeks rats."
sudo adjust reality so that from the summit of Mt. Diablo you can see more of the Earth's surface than any place else on Earth with the sole exception of Mt Kilimanjaro.
"WANTED: Sinking ship seeks rats."
The individual who perpetrated these crimes might be non-white, hence, they are going to throw the book at him.
I could be wrong, but this just seems to fit a narrative. If the perpetrator is white, well then, the person will likely get lenient sentencing.
Place something witty here
Little Bobby Tables strikes again!
I didn't do anything "evil" with it
So you only committed 13 felonies?
Ah the glorious NOP opcode 0x90. Back in the day I knew assembly just about as well as C.
Believe it or not, engaging in fraud is actually illegal. No matter how dumb you think they are.
And if you just "slap on the wrist", there's little disincentive to do it.
I'll consider these charges fair when they start charging high school bullies who beat up other students with 14 counts of assault.
Maybe we can make it go the other way, "Nerds will be nerds", and be done with it!
...who was a New York Teacher Of The Year: http://www.informationliberati...
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well.
Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, preempting the teaching function, which belongs to everyone in a healthy community. "
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"In the United States, the school-to-prison pipeline (SPP), also known as the school-to-prison link or the schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track, is the disproportionate tendency of minors and young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds to become incarcerated, because of increasingly harsh school and municipal policies. Many experts have credited factors such as school disturbance laws, zero tolerance policies and practices, and an increase in police in schools in creating the pipeline. This has become a hot topic of debate in discussions surrounding educational disciplinary policies as media coverage of youth violence and mass incarceration has grown during the early 21st century."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Surprises me that Google doesn't have a full built in pig Latin translator, just the auto correct?
Maybe of interest: https://bullies2buddies.com/
From the website: "What the [Golden Rule] really means is, We should be nice to people even when they are mean to us. ... The [Golden Rule] is the therefore the ultimate empowerment. It is the solution to being a victim. A victim reacts. A victim's behavior is therefore controlled by the bully. But in order to not be a victim, we must act independently of the bully's actions. We treat them like friends even when they treat us like enemies. And that way we end up controlling them."
Essentially, from a cybernetic perspective, Bullies to Buddies treats bullying as a positive feedback cycle between bully's taunts and victim's responses/rewards and trains victims in how to reduce the amplification of that cycle -- including through the use of humor. Doesn't work in all situations (e.g. the bully is just crazy) but is intended for run-of-the-mill bullying.
Why train the victim and not the bully? Because the victim is more motivated to change.
Some of the instructional videos are quite amusing as Izzy Kalman demonstrates the escalating cycle and the alternative.
He also explains how these techniques can be beneficial in the workplace and in marriages.
https://bullies2buddies.com/re...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
But 14 felones for a teenager acting up is just insane.
I'll consider these charges fair when they start charging high school bullies who beat up other students with 14 counts of assault.
Yes, high school teachers are by and large pretty stupid.
I suspect those felonies will be reduced to misdemeanors. But there still needs t be punishment.
On the other hand, are their no repercussions for the dumbasses that supplied their passwords? I could get in heap trouble at work for handing out my passwords to anyone.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I grew up in a fairly rough junior high school and high school. Bringing a cool game meant someone would grab it out of the drive and run off, so if one had anything new, you would almost certainly get mugged for it.
The one thing that made software cracking easy in the Apple ][ days was a special hardware card that had a button on it. Hit it, it did a NMI to the CPU, and you could then write everything from RAM to a floppy disk. This way, a lot of copy-protection systems were easily bypassed, such as Ultima III's. Couple this with the fact that at the time, you had two extra tracks on Apple ][ floppies that were not used. So, when making my gaming disks, I'd store the code that decrypted and loaded the RAM image on those two disks, and have it prompt for a password before loading the game. If someone grabbed the disk and tried to it, the two last tracks were not copied, and the disk would start beeping, with a message saying the game was pirated, and the SPA and FBI have been notified. While that message was on the screen, it would hit do a JMP to $A54F, zeroing out the disk. If the right password was not entered, the disk would prompt again for password #2, and #3, then quietly zero out the last two sectors, rendering the thing unusable. Control-reset was patched to just reboot completely, and control-c was disabled. I rearranged the track pattern slightly to make it unreadable from conventional Apple DOS/ProDOS (by patching out the OS looking for "D5AAAD" at the end of the sector, and writing my own stuff in that space.)
The result was, I could enjoy what warez I made and traded, and had my own copy-protection more sophisticated than what was out there, ensuring that if I made a copy of a game, there would only be one copy made of that game, and it wouldn't spread. Never had issues with theft either because of the self-destruction I put in place.
These days, it would be extremely primitive, but it did do a good job at the time, and because I had two sectors more space to store code than other disks, while Locksmith and Copy ][+ only copied one additional sector unless manually told to, I actually had truly uncopyable disks at the time.
Why?
You want it to be legal for people to access any computer system, irrespective of its owner's wishes or authority? You don't think that might cause some problems?
100% of everyone is an asshole sometimes. That doesn't innoculate them against the law.
A three year old may not understand what he did when he shoots and kills someone. A sixteen year old knows goddam well what he's doing. Being 16 doesn't make you immune to crime.
If a minor held a teacher at gunpoint to change their grades, would that make it a school issue and not a criminal one?
Just because I explained the reality of the situation doesn't mean I find it acceptable. Until the system is reformed (and I hope it happens), this is the cold reality of what the so-called "justice" system has now become. What do you want me to do about it? Scream, cry, and have a temper tantrum? Move to a more enlightened country?
Hey, if you think plea-bargaining is an outrage, then you'll loooove civil asset forfeiture. Here's a link to get you started. Enjoy! :-)
The US judicial system has more similarities with witch trials than actual justice.
On that, we can both agree. It's all about the money. Saving it (plea bargaining) and making it (civil asset forfeiture).
His record won't show up, when he's an adult.
You don't think maybe there is a problem with the legal system when this is a thing?
Plea bargaining is not bad, it's the American mockery of it. Here in Norway a typical plea length is ~80% of what the prosecution will ask for at trial, which seem sufficient for the vast majority of cases where the evidence is compelling. It's not worth gambling on a 1% technicality, while if they're trying to bring a dubious case to trial the risk of the full 100% is not going to scare off the innocent. In the US it's more like we have this scrap of evidence of a misdemeanor, take this plea bargain for 3 months or we'll try to put you away for 30 years. There should be a law that told the jury what plea bargain the defendant got and refused, maybe the at-trial convictions would not be so crazy. Because the problem is juries are often willing to "upsold" to say maybe not 30 but 10 years where even that is ridiculous.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"cop-hugging pigfucker"
I am always amused by people with this attitude who then usually end up calling these very same individuals when things go sideways.
Our society is largely built on a single premise...don't mess with other people's shit. The majority of problems we have involve people trying to take or taking other people's shit whether electronically, legally, while you aren't home, or just bashing you on the head and taking it.
So, no, crimes aren't pranks. And that simple "fun" has cost people time and money. You took their shit for a laugh.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The original Ferris Bueler's Day Off where he didn't go to jail was better.
This probably didn't cause any more inconvenience than the average college prank. Things like reassembling a car in a library, moving a professor's office to another floor, turning the MIT dome into a giant breast, or putting a piece of dating software onto a campus email system (in the UNIX shell days, the software kept a list of male and female students and would send random "write" messages or "ytalk" requests between them). So it should be treated as such - clean the results up, and some detention, since it's high school, not college.
Don't they have better things to do than catching teens changing their grades?
Should be fined to within an inch of their collective lives. There is no excuse for having a system vulnerable to phishing. Class III digital certificates and IPSec would be completely immune to phishing scams. Authentication via Kerberos would be beyond most teens.
Any member of staff that falls for phishing should be fired on the spot.
Any exam system that allows you to modify grades directly should be quietly buried in a landfill. A given answer gets a given mark. Actually, in the U.S., it's mostly multiple guess. The relative mark is thus fixed.
Only in countries with normalized grades for a region should allow the mean and standard deviation to be entered.
Excuses are reasonable, but whilst they can rationalize a grade, the grade is still the grade.
You're better off abandoning exams, but if you're going to have them then do it right.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I suspect those felonies will be reduced to misdemeanors.
Nope. Unfortunately for this teen, he's in a load of pig shit right now. Of course there's always the possibility of a plea bargain, first offense defense etc.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
And what is the larger lesson?
It's OK to break the law if (insert benevolent reason here)?
Tell us all how much is too much. How far is too far?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
... was "pencil" (no quotes).
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
... very soon.
Turns out, he's on the fast track to be the new front man for WikiLeaks and stuff.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Not really, the kid was smart enough to good grades and chose a life of crime instead. What is worse, ruining his life by proscecuting him or instead sweeping it under the rug and giving him detention (where you have to go to school Saturday school and Sunday school) instead of ruining his life. So once the collages see what he was doing, he will have brains and no way to use them except in crime.
Since when does phishing mean someone is some sort of smart hacker? He didn't exhibit any technical prowess beyond some minor social engineering; and teh proceeded to simply log on to the schools grading system. Per TFA, he also lowered some students grades, which, if you want to propose alternative punishment, would be a good case for some simple locker room justice. In addition, teachers there would have to recheck all the grades just to be sure tehy are correct. The only skill he demonstrated was that he could be a real PITA as well as being stupid.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
But if anyone who's likely to be called to jury duty on the case is reading this, some advice:
nullify. Nullify. NULLIFY.
Not that it's likely to get that far in a juvie case, but still ... remember that it's always your right to judge the law as well as the case.
Yes, in the US SCOTUS affirmed that right; but most judges will not inform the jury of that high and instruct them their duty is to decide on the facts presented; and if a lawyer brought it up the judge would no doubt be upset. The beauty (and danger) of nullification is there is no remedy to change the outcome, whether it is a desirable one in terms of justice or one that results in a miscarriage of justice. In some states, the state constitution specifically gives juries the right to decide the law as well. A quick Google search revealed a case http://www.peachtreenorml.org/... of nullification and the state's constitution state's In criminal cases, the defendant shall have a public and speedy trial by an impartial jury; and the jury shall be the judges of the law and the facts.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
"Making an example to deter" has worked so greatly for killing people for murder, hasn't it?
But it does, the number of murders is quite low. I've thought about murdering many people. If it were legal, I'd probably have carried through with a few, like that school administrator who thought bullying was "a part of growing up" and refuses to do anything about it.
In this case, the reason "making an example" doesn't work is because he and his peers haven't been alive long enough to hear about those examples. This is why minors are tried differently than adults.
"Mount Diablo Unified School District"
He was clearly going through hell.
Completely off topic trivia: From the summit of Mt Diablo (Devil's Peak) in Concord CA, you can see more of the earth's surface than anyplace else on earth with the sole exception of the summit of Mt Kilimanjaro. Like Kilimanjaro, Mt Diablo is an isolated peak, surrounded by vast flat surfaces (California's Central Valley to the East, and San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean to the West). You can see roughly 80,000 sq miles on a clear day.
Why don't you see 80,000 sq miles of ROUNDED surfaces?! Explain that one round-earther!
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Maybe he can hack in and reduce it to 1 misdemeanor?
-Dave
This is where a police officer can shoot and kill an unarmed person and not get charged with a crime, fired, or let alone lose any pay or be reprimanded.
Lawyers always win. They write the laws, and the laws on top of those laws, to ensure that they will always be employed. No matter what the charge, or the crime, you can be assured that lawyers will always come out on top. Funny how that works.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
No that only happens with bullies. Kid got beat up by the known bully(ies)? Usual reaction? âoeAh kids are kids and nerds will always be beaten up just like in my good old days.â
Just think about it. Need gets beat up, from the hospital room retaliates by changing their grades to all Fs. What would happen? 14 felonies for the nerd and detention for the bully at best?
BS
Stifle the genius, great work everyone involved.
How can you figure anything out without guidelines?
You are full of shit.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
That’s just alien nonsense.
They may not even be punished or get a slap on the wrist. I knew a kid that was busted for piracy but because he was a minor and all they did was confiscate his computer and software, some of which were later returned. Then again, that was the Secret Service since piracy is considered a financial crime (yep, the same apes that protect the president had jurisdiction) and he wasn't making any money from it, just cracking and distributing.
These are charges. He committed crimes, maliciously, with these stolen credentials. Presumably 14 of them. Wait for the sentencing to see if they go to far.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
And how do you propose to solve it? Trials cost millions because we want them to be accurate. We could presumably hires a bunch of high school dropouts and illegals to run trials for you for cents on the dollars, but then are they going to be as accurate as just having police threaten criminals into confessions?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
This is the same as it was before, though lots of confused slashdotters think it is something different.
In the United States, criminal charges that you receive as minor are routinely expunged from the record if you stay out of trouble. If you're 21 or something and you finished all your punishments, and you didn't get any new felonies after you turned 18, then you can get it totally erased as if it never happened. But if you did commit new felonies, then they'll likely leave it on your record.
So there is nothing significant about the combination of "minor" and "felony." When I was a teenager a number of decades ago, I had friends who got felonies for things like "arson" where the damages were under $5, and they weren't even trying to cause any damage. It doesn't mean they can never get a good job or travel or whatever, it just means that they're going to be getting extra supervision until they're older. If it is a felony or not is related to the technical question of what law was violated, and there are totally different systems in place to prevent that ruining a child's life.
And of course, a "load of pig shit" means A) a few years of probation, most likely unsupervised, B) possibly having to transfer to the special high school for kids who got kicked out of the regular high school, and C) he's unlikely to get academic scholarships and if his parents don't pay for his college he'll have to take out the same loans that other kids have to take out.
It is possible that he'd spend time in a detention center, but highly unlikely. That is generally reserved for kids who are committing crimes that directly harm strangers, violent crimes, and repeat offenders whose parents refuse to participate in a constructive way with probation. Most of the kids that see the inside of a detention center are only there for holding after arrest until their parents can come to pick them up.
They don't normally do "plea bargins" for minors unless they're charged as an adult, and that usually only happens for extreme violence. Instead, reduced charges are usually based on the parents convincing the prosecutor that they're going to punish the kid in a serious-minded way that alters his lifestyle and makes him feel punished. If the parents won't play ball, then they generally have to choose between detention or just dropping charges. Detaining minors is a huge burden on the State compared to detaining adults, and they don't really like doing it.
What most people can't comprehend about it is that the thing the people on the jury are doing when they decide guilt based on broader considerations of Justice is protected. And you could call that "jury nullification."
But when Judges are talking about Jury Nullification, and when the legal community is talking about it, that isn't what they mean. What they mean when they talk about it is a totally different act; the act of telling members of a jury that they can just ignore the law if they don't like it. The Jury isn't actually supposed to do that, its just that they never would without somebody telling them; when the Jury does it legitimately it is because having weighed the facts and the law they felt Justice for the community was best served by a Not Guilty verdict. They wouldn't be asked to explain it in such a deep way that it would even get into their opinions on the Law. So the banned thing isn't what the Jury does; the Jury can nullify not the law, but the application of the law in a particular instance before them. But that doesn't imply that it is acceptable for a lawyer to falsely tell the Jury that they can disregard the law. And when the Jury decides that Justice is best served by a Not Guilty verdict, they're not disregarding the law, they're simply including the goal of Justice in their analysis, which is part of their mandate.
This is why people who spout off about "Jury Nullification" are almost guaranteed to be ignorant of the law, or just trolling. If they understood the situation, and they truly wanted Juries to come to that sort of conclusion more often, they'd quit trying to confuse juries talking about "nullification" and they'd adopt some talking points about the Duty to consider the Justice of the result in each particular instance. But they don't want that, instead they want to incite Juries to mob-like behavior where they just repeat some echo-chamber nonsense and refuse to do the analysis they're instructed to do.
Based on my reading of Dante's Inferno, I would say that if he is "going through" Hell then it probably quite possible to get good grades. The real problem would be if he was not actually going through at all, and yet still there.
I'm not sure how Geography would even contribute to the analysis; how deep under the Earth is Hell again?
Mount Diablo also sounds a like more an exit than an entrance. Maybe the only relation that Hell has to the problem is that if you're standing next to the exit, you only just got to Purgatory and you have a lot more work to do!
All of that said, Diablo only means Devil. Surely such a school district would more accurately resemble the book of Job.
I have seen half dome on a good day from there. I grew up in Clayton.
Do you HONESTLY believe that the average murderer ponders "Hmm... for 5 years I'll kill him, but for 15, rather not..." before pulling the trigger? Seriously?
In over 95% of all bank robberies they have the culprit within 3 days. And in total it's almost 100%. And, at least in my country, armed bank robbery is getting really awfully close to murder when it comes to how much time you do (because it's considered taking hostages, threatening with a lethal weapon and a few other things on top of an armed robbery, and all those things carry a curiously high sentence to begin with... one has to wonder why). You rarely do less than 5 years and 10-15 is usual.
And? You think bank robberies cease to exist?
People planning to break the law don't ponder jail time. Never have, never will. That's not even part of their consideration. The only criminals who do take a potential punishment into account is those engaging in economic crimes, where the question whether to do it is solved by the inequation "if profit is higher than risk times fine, do it".
And curiously, the fines in THAT area are ridiculously low.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Surgery isn't as hard as you make it out to be. It's just that you can't rollback a patient if you fuck up. At least not all of the time. Then again, with a really fucked up database, chances are that a simple rollback won't make it come alive either anyway.
I expect a person using a tool to be able to use this tool. Else it can get messy and even dangerous. There's a reason you don't see me operate power tools, I prefer scalpels. Much more personal.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Good points. Juries can reach verdicts based on their definition of justice in the specific case and their general verdict has to be respected; but they should not just disregard the law because they don't like it. There can be a number of reasons juries return not-guilty verdicts despite what the facts appear to support; in one case where I was on a jury we could not figure out exactly what a person had to do to violate the law because the law was confusing and thus we could not determine if in fact the defendant violated it and thus returned a not guilty verdict on the charge.
The challenge is what powers do judges have to remove a juror who is determined to render a not guilty verdict simply because they want to ignore the law? It appears tehy can do that but have to be certain the reason is the juror wants to ignore the law.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
People planning to break the law don't ponder jail time. Never have, never will.
Now you're just denying reality. I'm one of those who planned to break the law at one point, then considered jail time and didn't follow through. What does that make me?
Bah. I reverse engineered the Novell Login program back in the day. Wrote virus-like tech hidden on the PC that intercepted the Login and password requested transparently, and saved the combo to an encrypted file. Had lists of username/passwords of nearly 300 users. In the end, I was not smart to no brag to the wrong persons about it, and also made a few stupid mistakes. If it were today, would be expelled.
A manager.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Now that's what I call a LIFE HACK.
That's a good question. The best I see so far from a quick search is satisfaction survey results posted on the website with a lot of "very helpful" results ( https://bullies2buddies.com/do... ) and a decade-old pilot study that shows negligible results from a brief training ( https://www.psychologytoday.co... ). One confounding factor obvious from the pilot study is that kids undergoing the Bullies to Buddies training are less likely to report incidents -- meaning ideally the evaluation should be done other than by self-reports. I agree it would be good to have more recent and more extensive studies of the Bullies to Buddies program. You are right to point to AA as an example of a social movement not being backed by evidence and perhaps pushing out other better options for many people.
Ultimately, there are quite a few "knobs" one could theoretically tweak to reduce bullying in schools, including:
* educate the Victim (Bullies to Buddies or a different approach)
* educate the Bully (most bully training materials)
* educate the Bystander (also, most bully training materials)
* educate the Adults -- Teachers/Administrators/Parents
* general custom emotion coaching for every kid (like say done at the Albany Free School http://www.albanyfreeschool.or... ),
* make it possible for the victim to walk away (e.g. more alternative education options including freeschooling and homeschooling)
* make the environment more interesting and less stressful so kids have many other things to do than taunt each other
* change the nature of the schooling system and teaching so it does not itself model authotarianism/bullying e.g. John Taylor Gatto's writings like (http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=11375)
* de-emphasize competition and promote cooperation (like Alfie Kohn suggests https://www.alfiekohn.org/cont... ) or pursue other ways of reducing needless stress in school like eliminating homework ( https://www.alfiekohn.org/dwh/ ) and grades ( https://www.alfiekohn.org/arti... )
* improve nutrition for everyone ("Omega-3, junk food and the link between violence and what we eat (Research with British and US offenders suggests nutritional deficiencies may play a key role in aggressive behavior" https://www.theguardian.com/po... )
* reduce the stress on families by progressive economics (better-paying jobs, basic income, universal health insurance, bugger tax credits to families with children, and so on)
* other?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.