Enjoy your visit, but mind what you, and your t-shirts, say, and if you have a run-in with the constabulary, you’d be well advised to keep your mouth shut.
The case of the rural West Virginia eighth-grader who was suspended and arrested in late April after he refused to remove a t-shirt supporting the National Rifle Association just keeps getting weirder.Say, I’ve got a question for the prosecutors. The city of Logan is the county seat of Logan County. Now, it looks to me like Logan’s crime rates, in terms of both violent crimes and property crimes, have historically exceeded the national average. My question for the prosecutors is this: do ya’ll really think the best interests of your county are being served by pursuing this case? I mean, is the scourge of t-shirts that the young man’s teacher finds objectionable a worse menace than, say, all those burglaries? (What are your arrest and conviction rates for those, by the way?) And let’s just cut to the chase: do you believe that this boy – whose only real “crime” was probably in being a little prolix in defending his rights to arresting officer James Adkins – deserves jail time? And what about you, Adkins? You didn’t have the mother wit to resolve this trivial situation without turning it into a criminal case? I’m tellin’ ya, son, when people think back on this, they ain’t goin’ to be makin’ any favorable comparisons between you and Wyatt Earp (“Adkins? Why, yes, I recollect him. Wasn’t much good at catchin’ burglars or car thieves, but he was a bulldog at chasin’ down offensive t-shirts, yessir, jes’ a reg’lar bulldog!”)
According to local CBS affiliate WOWK-TV, the student, 14-year-old Jared Marcum, was back at the Logan County Courthouse on Monday for a hearing because prosecutors Christopher White and Sabrina Deskins were seeking an emergency gag order.
What the school did (and it wasn't even his teacher - I believe he was stopped in the cafeteria/lunch time, having been in 5 classes before) and now what the Judge and Prosecutors are now doing is the purest form of bullying.
ReplyDeleteI thought schools were against bullying? Now I am confused.
I think you nailed it, Paco. Seems like the prosecutors (much like the federal administration currently in charge) need a T-shirt controversy and a teenaged "enemy" to distract from the Real Problems they were put in place to solve, but don't seem to be able to.
ReplyDeleteA definite case of "Respect mah authoriteh!"
ReplyDeleteWhere is Logan County? Is it so far up in the hills that they haven't got news of the Bill of Rights, yet?
ReplyDeleteSounds like the prosecutor (and judge, no doubt) realized that their pants are down around their ankles.
ReplyDeleteWhy didn't that idiot judge have the wit to dismiss this case and laugh it out of court ab initio?
ReplyDeleteWe're getting a pretty lousy class of machine political hacks on the bench nowadays (we'll get even worse if Obama gets any more USSC nominees). One doesn't expect great intelligence from such people (from unwise Latinas, for example), but one does have a right to expect a little common sense.
Here in the Peoples Republic of California, we voters have the ability (for now) to remove at the ballot box judges whose political hackery becomes too obvious (and public). See formerCSSC Justice Rose Bird, for example.
ReplyDelete(I think she's passed on, but whatever...)