Sad Day for Free Speech

A New York Appeals Court ruled against Avery Doninger in a free speech case many have been following closely. The Courant reports

The ruling by the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York only addressed a preliminary issue in the case of Avery Doninger, a senior at Lewis S. Mills High School, who has argued that school district administrators violated her First Amendment rights by disciplining her for a blog post she wrote off school grounds.

But the court's ruling weighed in on a hotly contested and evolving area of the law, freedom of expression on the Internet. The three-judge panel stopped short of declaring how far schools can go in regulating offensive Internet speech made off campus, but stated that the school did not violate the Constitution in disciplining Doninger because her blog post "created a foreseeable risk of substantial disruption" at the school.

Thursday's ruling addressed a request by Doninger's attorney for an injunction to allow Doninger to serve as class secretary, which she was barred from doing because of the blog post. A federal district court judge rejected the request last year, finding that Doninger had not proven a substantial likelihood of challenging the constitutionality of her punishment. The appeals court agreed.

Thomas R. Gerarde, an attorney for defendants Paula Schwartz, the former Region 10 superintendent, and Mills Principal Karissa Niehoff, said the rulings by both courts "exonerated" the school district administrators.

"It's a very, very decided victory for Region 10. There's no other way to look at this," he said.

Jon L. Schoenhorn, Doninger's attorney, said the ruling could "emasculate the First Amendment rights of students."

"If this [blog post] was potentially disruptive, then they might as well empty out half of the schools of not just Connecticut but probably in this country," he said.

Schoenhorn noted that the rulings were based on a limited record and predicted that the courts would rule differently once the full case is heard in a trial.

A disappointed Lauren Doninger, Avery's mother, said she and her daughter had always planned to go to trial for reasons beyond the student government and graduation.

"We filed for an injunction because we really hoped to somehow hold on to part of this senior year experience for Avery," she said. "That's not going to happen, but that doesn't change that we need to move forward to trial. We need to really explore student speech rights at the judicial level in the age of the Internet."

The case originated in a dispute last spring about the Burlington school's Jamfest, a battle of the bands that Doninger helped coordinate. Frustrated that it was not going ahead as planned, Doninger wrote on her livejournal.com Weblog that "Jamfest is canceled due to the douchebags in central office." She encouraged others to write or call Schwartz "to piss her off more."

Jamfest wasn't actually canceled, and was later rescheduled. Administrators found the blog entry about two weeks after Doninger wrote it, and Niehoff told Doninger to apologize to Schwartz, show her mother the post and stop seeking re-election as class secretary.

Doninger agreed to the first two, but refused to withdraw her candidacy. Though Doninger was not allowed to run, enough students wrote in her name that she won. She was barred from serving.

The appeals court based much of its analysis on the 2nd Circuit case Wisniewski v. Board of Education of the Weedsport Central School District in New York, in which a student was suspended after creating an instant-messaging icon that suggested his teacher should be shot. The court upheld the suspension last year, saying it was reasonable to expect the icon would come to the attention of school authorities and could create a risk of substantial disruption to the school environment.

This serves as yet another example of the degree of degradation of the court system due to forty years of reactionary judges being force fed en mass into the government. America's court have all of the integrity of courts in totalitarian regimes.

When students are denied the right to exercise citizen's rights they will learn to deny those rights of others when they're older. When children are indoctrinated to be silent in the face of what they feel is injustice then our democracy is forsaken.

The embers of the Bill of Rights are not a flicker of hope but of despair that the American people have let the monsters running our government touch our children's lives with the perversions of intolerance and educational internment. The damage these crazy bastards have done to our country is as unforgivable as it is irreparable.

I hear atheists saying, God help us all!

Shock and Law

The hate crime being perpetrated in Guilford against Nathan Fisher is incredibly simple to deconstruct once you begin to sort out the sequence of events and eliminate the one-sided treatment of Fisher by both WTNH and the print media in New Haven.

First, by visiting the Guilford High School web site, you can access the Student/Parent handbook. The make-up homework section reads as follows;

MAKEUP
WORK: ACADEMIC
All makeup work is the responsibility of the student. Arrangements should be made with individual teachers, however the teacher and the student are mutually responsible for communicating what work needs to be completed. Work missed because of an unverified absence or "cut" may not be made up for credit.
All absences from school must be verified by a parental telephone call or note. Students will have at least one day to make up missed assignments or to prepare for tests, quizzes, and projects for each verified absence. (Tests, quizzes, and major projects may require multiple days.) This deadline can be extended if mutually agreed upon by both the teacher and the student.

Numerous reports, blogs and commentary fail to get this simple fact straight. Nathan Fisher had no responsibility to bring the make-up work to anyone. He broke no rules or protocol. None.

As we know from a previous post, the summer reading list that all other students chose from was simply a recommended list. Nate was kind enough to offer make-up choices that could be quickly finished (say, over the Labor Day weekend)so as not to punish the new student for a missed assignment she had no knowledge of.

In a comics blog called The Beat, the mother of this teen claims to give us the facts and all of the quotes from the mother originate in her correspondences there.

The mother tells us "Her brand new English teacher asked her to stay after class so he could give her an assignment to read over the labor day long weekend"... "on the second day of school". It is important to note this because on the following Tuesday, the THIRD day of school, our mom who expects immediate gratification claims her complaint falls on deaf ears. My guess is that the THIRD day of school's morning after a long holiday weekend is chaotically hectic. The mother claims she "was brushed off" by the school.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Sequentially, the next set of claims concern the "discovery" of the book assignment. This event has two different explanations but first let's talk about what most kids do when they bring homework home.

If my teens come home with a book my wife and I both know it. We ask, "Do you have any homework" and reading always yields a set of moans that means they have something to do and we find out what it is.

Privately, this is what the teen says happened in her household as well. Comments left here previously claim, "The girl showed her parents the book, her mom didn't "discover" it. I know. I heard her telling people."

But that's not mom's story. Mom claims she "discovers" the book on Saturday because her daughter, having been warned that the book contained mature themes decides that sharing these mature themes with her younger siblings is the thing to do. Mom claims to be shocked, "So I said to the group of children - “what’s so funny you guys!” So the kids reply - We are laughing at the reading assignment from her teacher - “The two kids are doing it” - So I said - Give me that!"

This ambiguity is striking because if the daughter told the parents about her homework assignment and showed it to them as the daughter claims, the parents had numerous ways to resolve the issue.

First, "I don't want you reading this book."

Second, notify the teacher why you object. Guilford's high school web site offers an email complaint line, phone numbers where messages can be left, and the student/Parent handbook describes the complaint process; 1. notify the school then, if not satisfied, 2. notify the district, 3. superintendent 4. Board of Education.

What is doubly disingenuous about the mother's account is the inclusion of the younger children in the claim. It's a surefire tear-jerker. But if they knew about the book's contents and allowed it to happen then shame on them.

One also has to wonder if the family "picnic" she refers to was a meeting with the family relative who is a "police detective in another town". If so, it may indicate a deliberate deception. The dad, later interviewed by the New Haven Register, seems like a seething character needing sedation or and anger counselor and this is days later.

If this book was the topic of discussion at the family picnic one can imagine dad being fit to be tied. The decision to escalate the book incident to a police matter had to be a consideration on Saturday. But, let's face it, complaining about a book is not enough. The family would have to think of an angle to make this teacher pay. It takes no stretch of the imagination to speculate that someone said, "Hey, what if the guy is a pervert - we could fix him good if that were the case." Indeed.

The mother, in disclosing the "facts" is careful to point out such details. "Why would this teacher think my 13 year old would want to read this! I could not imagine what this teacher had in mind with my daughter by giving her this comic. I was fearful that I knew what might be on his mind!" She says this in reference to first seeing "the fluffy blue bunny page" on Saturday.

In other words, the mother believes the teacher has made an untoward advance on her daughter because of a dialog a fluffy blue bunny character in a book has. Let's assume she really believes her own imaginings. One would think that she would not only say, "you aren't reading this book" but "AND we're changing teachers on Tuesday". Nothing of the sort happens.

Nor does either parent research the book or author. Nor do they ask their daughter why she might have chosen the book. The mother offers a lame explanation that her daughter thought it was about shooting pool which makes no sense at all. The book is obviously not a book about playing pool and cracking the book randomly would yield this information.

The mother also goes to great lengths to frame the idea that "I showed the school and the resource officer what was given to my daughter and they were very surprised, this is not part of the allowed reading material for teachers to give." Yet as you can see the curriculum is rich with sophisticated reading material and teachers and students negotiate appropriate assignments.

What transpires on Tuesday can have many contexts. The mother's explanation cleverly sidesteps the seething anger of a father who even most recently swears to see to it that Nathan Fisher "never teaches again" and threatens Fisher with legal action.

At face value, one has to wonder if, during the family picnic, it was decided to frame Fisher as a sexual predator. The family police insider could easily call in some favors and set the stage. Or, mom, knowing that this insider was in her back pocket could play a handful of Aces and Jokers.

In other words, the school and its administration would be hit with such an immediate and unrelenting bursts of claims and counter-claims that Nate Fisher would be unemployed and legal jail-bait before anyone could react - a shock and awe offensive.

Tuesday morning.

Mom claims, "when I went to the police and the school, we were not on a witch-hunt - we weren’t out to get anyone fired and we were really hoping this was all a big mistake. We thought possibly that maybe some kid stuck this in his classroom as a joke and that happened to be the one she picked up thinking it was about playing pool."

Really? Why would she think so. Her daughter chose the book and told her parents so. Here the explantions start to unravel. The mother first claims "One book was about shooting pool, or so she thought - This would be Eightball (issue #22)." Her claim is implausible. She knew and admits to what she knew about her daughter's choice yet claims she hoped it was all a big mistake. What field of magic would intervene?

In actuality, we know from dad's media exposure that they had and have every intention of not only getting Fisher fired but claiming sexual deviancy in his actions and threatening lawsuits on these claims.

Her revised explanation of this same event claims, "on Tuesday morning I called the school and requested to speak with someone about it. I was brushed off. Apparently, the administration felt that I was what almost everyone who doesn’t have the facts think I am, a crazy overprotective mother who has a religious or other agenda.

At this point, I spoke with family members, one of which is a police detective in another town in CT. He, and all of my family members advised me to bring the matter to the attention of the police department. I went there Tuesday morning, and they referred me to the school resource officer, who is a police officer who is stationed at the high school."

This second explanation contradicts the first. Seeking immediate gratification, she claims getting brushed off in a phone call on one of the most hectic and busy days of the school year. She leaves no message?

And, she claims that she immediately calls all family members on Tuesday morning and they insist this (what?) is a police matter. Why are the police needed to switch homework assignments or switch teachers? And why, if she believes the teacher is a predator, allow her daughter to go back to class? Again, this is implausible and inconsistent.

After that (same morning) she drives to the school. "I went there Tuesday morning, and they referred me to the school resource officer, who is a police officer who is stationed at the high school.

I showed the comic, and asked for advice on what I should do. He immediately brought me to see the principal, and an investigation was started through the school administration."

Her actions are frantic, calculated, she touches all the bases required to set the teacher up if that is an intention and touches none of the procedures needed for due process. The steps she describes are almost orchestrated for dramatic effect and plausible deniability. She has set all the wheels in motion to frame the teacher yet never says, "I don't want my daughter reading this book and I want her class reassigned."

Her daughter attends class that day and the mother says, "She told him that she really thought it was disgusting and inappropriate and he said yes, I told you it might be a little bit mature." The mother offers no more of the conversation. Did Fisher apologize? What happened?

She describes her reaction, "Well when I heard this, I was really disgusted. What can I assume in this day and age was this teachers motives?? I put her back in the car and I went back down to the school. I asked to see the principal again and I told him what was said to her after class."

Disgusted by what? What motive could be implied except something manufactured? Why didn't mom go and talk to Fisher after class with her daughter?

Could the answer be that the whole thing was staged? Choreographed using insider information to deny Fisher due process, the ability to understand or respond to the unspoken concerns of the parents, or to defend his integrity due to an overload of the due process by aggressive, disingenuous police activity instigated not by any real crime but by family connection?

Is it possible that the family has suffered stock market or hedge fund losses and created a perfect storm scenario for a civil suit to restore lost assets?

In region 19, teachers have a classroom phone that they can be called on and email addresses to be contacted off-hours with. Why didn't the police allow the school investigation to complete before strong arming the administration to laying out an ultimatum with Fisher that amounts to little more than institutional blackmail and a fate of personal humiliation for Fisher?

If I were a heads-up insurance fraud investigator I would look at a case like this and salivate at the opportunity to question witnesses, examine phone records, time-date stamps, family relationships, due process violations, and so on. Fisher never knew what hit him nor did the school but we're much closer to knowing that now and it isn't pretty.

Julie Amero, Michael Skakel, Hillary Bargar-Strackbein, and Imus

The Courant ran an article about Michael Skakel requesting a new trial.

It has been 31 years since 15-year-old Martha Moxley was bludgeoned to death in the gated Greenwich community of Belle Haven, where she lived diagonally across the street from the Skakel mansion. It has been almost five years since Skakel was convicted of killing her, based largely on the testimony of a teen classmate-turned-heroin addict who came forward more than 20 years after the murder to claim Skakel once said, "I'm going to get away with murder; I'm a Kennedy."

In seven days of hearings before Karazin that concluded Wednesday, Skakel's lawyers, Hope Seeley and Hubert Santos, marshaled evidence of:

A man who claims his two "out-of-control" friends, one of them obsessed with Martha, remained in Belle Haven the night of the killing and later boasted of achieving their fantasy of "going caveman" on a girl. All three men, including the tale's originator-Gitano "Tony" Bryant -invoked their right against self-incrimination during sworn depositions and did not testify during the hearing. Bryant's mother, Barbara, in voluntary discussions with Skakel investigators, said her then 14-year-old son was in Belle Haven that night, and told her his friends, Adolph Hasbrouck and Burton Tinsley, remained behind in Belle Haven after he returned home to New York.

Documents withheld from the defense team during Skakel's 2002 trial that could have shown a jury how seriously investigators considered suspects other than Skakel, including his older brother, Thomas.

A book deal by lead inspector Frank Garr, formalized after the verdict but informally agreed upon with investigative reporter Len Levitt, in 1999. Seeley and Santos said the deal compromised the integrity of the prosecution, and Garr's work on the defense team's claims of newly discovered evidence.

Three former classmates of Skakel's at the controversial Elan School in Maine who dispute the claims by Gregory Coleman that he heard Skakel say he would get away with murder because he's a Kennedy. (Skakel is the nephew of Ethel Skakel Kennedy and the slain presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.) One, John Simpson, said he challenged Coleman's claim the night he made it, and that in reply, Coleman told him Skakel did not answer one way or another but merely grinned.

The last time I commented on a trial where the defense was denied important evidence is the Juile Amero trial that is globally recognized as this century's most outrageous witch-hunt.

The Skakel trial may be this century's worst rich-hunt.

During the Skakel trial, Judge Hillary Strackbein was a juvenile court prosecutor, Hillary Bargar (sometimes Barger in the media). At the time she was widely quoted regarding Michael Skakel's juvenile status at the time of the crime. Less-widely reported is her role as reported here.

In Court Wednesday, Michael Skakel's attorney, Michael Sherman, told Judge Maureen Dennis he did not want to have a full hearing on the matter and later said he had "complete faith" in Goldberg's integrity.

But outside court, he said he was concerned about what he called the prosecution's "stampede to uncover negative information about Michael Skakel."

"I'm concerned about some manner of unbridled prosecutorial efforts to convict Michael Skakel," he said.

Sherman said no juvenile records were found because Skakel was never arrested as a juvenile.

"He has never had a juvenile record _ never did," Sherman said.

Juvenile records are routinely checked by both prosecutors and defense attorneys in all cases as part of trial preparation.

"There was absolutely no impropriety here," said Hillary Bargar, the juvenile prosecutor who requested the records.

I am not so sure. The more I have learned about Connecticut's scales of justice overbearingly tipped toward the prosecution, the more I believe this man was railroaded.

The road to political success in Connecticut and this country is in mining hate. For well over thirty years I would commute to work and listen to one radio talk show hate monger after another bash liberals. But their secondary target was rich people. And Michael Skakel is as distasteful a rich man as they come. The fact that he was related to the Kennedys who during the Bush administration's descent into political dementia were also objects of hate speech from the talk-radio genre.

Skakel's baggage, bad timing, and the unbridled ambition of prosecutors makes this case yet another prime suspect as an American injustice. The media pundits spent weeks of denial that the Virginia Tech shooter in fact had a motive that was no crazier than the radio talk show hosts'. The shooter hated rich people with the same conviction that neo-cons hate the Kennedys, liberals, and Hollywood political activists.

The more I read about the Skakel trial, the more I believe he may be an innocent man as much a victim of the same hate cultivated by an enterprising media, dog-eat-justice prosecutorial court system, and a public conditioned to rationalize and exorcise their own hate on high-profile celebrities.

He deserves another trial with all the evidence on the table and the public needs to seriously begin to question whether the courts of Connecticut dispense justice or simply mete out blind punishment. The prosecutors of this country can make the same boast that they are "getting away with murder" by milking the public intolerance for innocence as Michael Skakel is accused of saying while under the influence of addictive drugs.

Pornography in the Classroom; Justice Perverted

The story of substitute Julie Amero deserves the attention of the teacher's unions, parents, administrators and law enforcement and I mean both ears listening eyes open and paying attention.

I don't know anything about Julie Amero except that she faces a forty year term in prison for allegedly exposing children to pornography.

Here's an opinion from the Norwich Bulletin;

Norwich substitute teacher Julie Amero clearly was wrong to access several pornographic Web sites on her computer at Kelly Middle School. In October 2004, she exposed seventh-grade students to images of naked men and women. For her crimes, she is facing up to 40 years in prison.

We find that potential punishment excessive, but we do expect that this sordid experience will serve as a cautionary tale to every parent, teacher and school administrator in Eastern Connecticut.

Amero, 40, of Windham, would appear to be an unlikely person to expose children to the lurid images she called up on the classroom computer. She had no criminal record.

Like all substitute teacher candidates, Norwich Superintendent of Schools Pam Aubin said Amero underwent extensive background checks that included fingerprinting. She had taught at Kelly for 1 1/2 years without incident.
Intent was apparent

Still, she was accused and convicted of intentionally accessing several pornographic sites -- not pop-up ads or windows, as she suggested. And she did not turn off the computer when the students saw the images.

While her deeds were disgusting and merit punishment, we expect that her sentence would be significantly less than the maximum 40 years, which some convicted killers do not get.

This is not to minimize the crime she committed; the intent is to have the punishment fit the crime. Sentencing is set for March 2.

That said, this must be a wake-up call for school districts and administrators, who need to ensure that all computers have the proper filters so that a potentially dangerous Web site is not accessible; who need to ensure that substitutes are monitored and managed well; and that children are protected in every other way.

Aubin characterized the Amero case as a "needle in a haystack," and that may well be.

But one needle can do a lot of damage -- to a school district's reputation, and to its students.

I will tell you why she is innocent and why the Bulletin and the entire system has failed Julie Amero. Furthermore, IMO, the Norwich Bulletin's opinion reduces American Justice to a lynch mob mentality more like Iraq than anything we as Americans represent.

I have worked in various roles as a computer scientist for over 25 years. I have been a parent for over thirteen. I have taught school on occasion and I serve on the Region 19 School Board in Connecticut - hence my blog.

The exposure of so-called pornographers has become a law enforcement cottage industry over the years. Every so often, I'll read a newspaper article in which some over-zealous enforcement agency "finds pornography on a civic computer" and of course the owner of that computer is inevitably treated and sentenced like a dissident in a totalitarian regime. In this case, this substitute teacher is facing a sentence of forty years in prison! Note once again the inflammatory rhetoric used by the holy and judgmental Norwich Bulletin to smear this woman's reputation; "her deeds were disgusting and merit punishment" and "this sordid experience will serve as a cautionary tale to every parent, teacher and school administrator in Eastern Connecticut." Not only that - they infer that A CRIME has been committed!

Listen to these words carefully.

The teacher's unions and every self-respecting citizen in this country should petition that this verdict be thrown out and that the school administrators who failed to help her turn off the computer be fired. If the judge in this case was derelict in duty then the State needs to take a hard look at what's going on in the justice system in Norwich as well.

Here's why I believe, without a shadow of a doubt, that this woman is innocent. Years ago, I taught an entry level computer science course at Mohegan Community College that in down times attracted older students looking for career salvation or enhancement using computers. What I encountered was a profound ignorance of how computers work and sometimes a mistrust of technology that colleagues refer to as cyberphobia.

About a dozen years ago, I had a student who at the end of a semester asked if I could look at her computer at work because it was acting "funny". She worked at the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union. As a pro bono gesture, I met her at her office one afternoon to take a look. What I found was a computer that had never quite been set up correctly and which looked to have been under continuous attack by every conceivable malicious entity one could imagine. There was nothing I could do to help and I believe I advised her to back-up the important things and totally reformat the disk or request a new machine. However, the experience has remained with me for years and I've seen the same effect in other State agencies and private companies - spyware, viruses, malware, and uninvited, self-propogating content.

A number of years ago, when my boys were on AOL messaging their friends I noticed some troubling things. They were somehow getting subscribed to buddy lists enticing them to talk to strangers. To this day I don't know if these were pornographers or police entrapping kids to join pornography chats - who knows where this stuff comes from. But what I do know is that it took me DAYS of dedicated time to rid the computer of stuff that was being downloaded without anyone's knowledge.

I lectured my boys and the parents of the other kids to be careful and clean out the buddy lists and so on. But these are losing battles. In our home instant messaging for the boys was eliminated.

But every year I do a sweep of the home computers which I have locked down fairly tightly for inappropriate materials. And every year, spyware, viruses, inappropriate stuff shows up and it is never an easy thing to get rid of. The idea that anyone can just shut off the machine and it will all be alright is a joke.

The sophistication of today's cyber-villans is scary and it is ubiquitous. The people assigned infected computers are no more pornographers than church-going people are. I will wager that the prosecutor, the police chief who testified against this woman, the judge, the school administration, and the Norwich Bulletin have machines as infected as Julie Amero's was when she entered that classroom. I am further willing to wager that all those self-righteous people are equally clueless how to make the obscene stuff go away.

This incident is a lesson in the miscarriage of American Justice and it reeks to high heaven. The idea that a middle-school substitute teacher HAD MOTIVE to expose teens to porn IS SO ABSURD AT FACE VALUE that everyone involved in this travesty should have their heads examined.

As a teacher and a computer professional I have watched my students, neighbors, and my family struggle with how to stop a virus, or automatic pop-ups, or finding the "OFF" button. The story of this poor woman, in a strange classroom, confronted with a cyber-assault that no one seemed to know how to remedy is Kafka-esque in tragedy. Julie Amero is every innocent American.

The legislatures need to begin to demand rigorous "innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt thresholds" on such incidents. The true villans exist in cyberspace and not in the office, classroom, or next door. The pushers of unwelcome content are victimizing too many innocent people and we need to confront the problem with a clear head instead of a brain dead, holier-than-thou lynch mob. Today, anyone's computer, protected or not, can fall prey to profoundly disturbing misuse without the consent, awareness, or intervention of the user. And so-called computer forensic experts cannot, without significant compelling evidence, determine if human intervention causes the effect.

This woman needs a fair, intelligent retrial sooner than later. Her only crime appears to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Everyone else involved should be ashamed.