Not long ago, I wrote about the Illinois high school student who was arrested after writing an essay that his teacher and school officials found disturbing. Now, it's certainly understandable, especially in the shadow of the Virginia Tech shooting, that school officials and law enforcement should be sensitive to violent tendencies. The problem is, it's not a crime to write an essay, and while there's a good argument that it shouldn't have been ignored, there's a better argument that we shouldn't charge people with crimes unless we have at least a reasonable belief that they might have committed them.
Allen Lee was charged with disorderly conduct, which the Cary police chief said could apply to writings that "disturb an individual".
Now, the charges have been dropped. That's not a big surprise, because when a charge actually goes to court, the prosecutor is expected to prove the elements of the crime. This is what the "disturb an individual" provision of the Illinois disorderly conduct statute actually says:
(a) A person commits disorderly conduct when he knowingly:
(1) Does any act in such unreasonable manner as to
alarm or disturb another and to provoke a breach of the peace;
I guess the chief of police forgot about the "and".
So the charges have been dismissed, though Lee's early enlistment in the marines has been cancelled and it remains to be seen whether or not he's eligible for re-enlistment.
The most disturbing aspect of the story, though, comes straight from the mouths of law enforcement, who apparently indicated that the arrest had been justified based on "fear of an imminent attack on the school". That might or might not be a reasonable fear--I'm not even going there. What bothers me is that Lee was charged with disorderly conduct, not "presenting an imminent threat to the school". Why? Being a potentially dangerous person is not a crime. So law enforcement officials arrested Lee for a crime of which he was clearly not guilty, then admitted that they'd really arrested him for another reason entirely. The charges were dropped, they said, when it was "determined that he was not a danger".
Um.
Wait.
I thought we were talking about whether or not he'd committed the crime of disorderly conduct?
In fact, Allen Lee was arrested for a Future Crime (Anyone else see that Tom Cruise movie? Oh, right. Everyone. Well, except the Cary chief of police, that is.) And then it was determined that the Future Crime wasn't going to occur, so they let him go. But it still looks like a slippery slope to me.
2 comments:
i just wrote a post in april about this same subject... maybe you'd like to read it...
http://why-paisley.blogspot.com/2007
/04/right-brain-activity.html
you will have to cut and paste it,, i don't know how to send a link in a comment
Youch. :(
That's almost enough to scare a person off of writing, in a way. Granted, when I was in grade and high schools, none of the essays or anything else I wrote involved anything that could be taken as an "imminent threat" or whatnot.
In college, though, I wrote an essay in one of my writing classes about the history of torture devices. My brain escapes me now as to the full reason of this, but I had been inspired by a professor who was passionate about controversial topics, and also a piece written by Jean Foucault.
It's a little scary now to think of the fact that in this day and age, with the campus violence that has been so rampant in ALL levels of schooling, that if someone had read my paper, they could possibly have twisted it into whatever they wanted to think about my mental state, and my ability to threaten a mass of people. :(
I was just a young college student who'd been encouraged to write since a young age, and wanted to write something about that all important first "controversial" topic. Granted, abortion is "controversial" but if you ask me about it purely as a topic for writing, I'd say it's "old hat."
Anyway, I'm cautiously glad the charges were dropped against the boy, but yes, it DOES open up a HUGE bag of "What if?"'s, and "How do we handle this now?"'s.
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