The Hook reports on the 15-year-old would-be bomber’s punishment:
Amid the sobbing of family and friends, Judge Susan Whitlock committed the Albemarle High student found guilty of conspiring blow up two high schools to the Department of Juvenile Justice for 60 days, with a review May 23.
And in another development, sources revealed that the conviction was based not on any physical evidence or online communications but on a lawyerless interrogation between police and the 15-year-old boy. In court, Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Darby Lowe asked that the boy be committed, citing his statement to the police that “We were just going to go to school and kill everybody we saw who wasn’t our friends.”
One would think that 60 days would include time served, but apparently not.
“We were just going to go to school and kill everybody we saw who wasn’t our friends”????
Whether the kid would have done that or not (and no one knows, not even parents, what a kid might do), I think he needs help of some kind. That sounds to me very different from Waldo (and other posters) saying they fantasized now and then about blowing up the school.
Unfortunately, I doubt he’ll get much useful help from the institutions he’s headed for.
This is just a horrible outcome. A cabal of jackbooted thugs trained in extracting confessions against an witless adolescent….you think they might get what they want to hear out of the kid?
There is a 99.9% chance those kids were not criminals….and about a the same chance they will be in a few years. What an absolute miscarriage of justice. Disgusting.
Yeah, that’s a pretty serious statement. Perhaps there’s some context that makes it less bad (“What was the running joke between us? We were just going to go to school and kill everybody we saw who wasn’t our friends. It was a joke. It’s not like we’d ever do it.”) but, frankly, I doubt it. I can’t see getting any kind of a conviction unless he meant it. Or so I hope.
I’m not feeling so good about the conviction being based solely on a 15-year-old’s confession to an officer without an attorney present. The only things I know about interrogations come from watching “Law & Order,” true, but that seems ungood.
Why all the sturm and drang about “the conviction being based solely on a 15-year-old’s confession to an officer without an attorney present?” There’s no accusation the confession was coerced, only a bunch of hand-wringing that if only his lawyer could have gotten there faster and shut him up, the cops would have had little to hang there hat on.
Society has gotten so hung up on Miranda and other procedural safeguards (which weren’t violated here) that we often lose sight of whether or not the accused is guilty of that crime with which he is charged. IMO, that ought to be the standard – not a buch of legal mumbo jumbo used to exclude actual evidence of a guilty mind collected by the police.
I hope the ‘confession’ was on tape and the judge at least listened to it carefully for herself. The police and prosecutors are not impartial in their interpretation of these things. If the judge relied on her own ears and eyes (I would imagine these are all videotaped, given the County PD’s recent history of violently extracting confessions), then I think it’s OK. I do not agree w/ Judge Smails’ rather cavalier attitude towards procedure.
It is not difficult to imagine, given the legal history of this student, that the student has developed an above the law attitude – common to 15 year olds generally, particularly ones that have challenged the ‘law’ (school rules) and won. Although it’s really impossible for one person to know what’s in another person’s heart for certain, a little time in the JD system will impress upon this young man that some things are not joking matters – or at least that discretion is of the utmost importance.
I haven’t heard a tape of the confession and I know only what I have read, even so I am inclined to agree with Hunchback. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if the police intimidated and coerced the boy and then Camblos misrepresented what they extracted. When I was 17 I was arrested in front of Mincer’s on the Corner. It was during an anti-war protest at UVa. An Albemarle County deputy was walking down University Avenue tearing down anti-war fliers as he walked. I yelled at him that he didn’t have the right to trample the First Amendment. I got arrested and thrown into a Mayflower moving van along with about 65 other people. At 4am the next morning my parents came to get me. James Camblos, the father of the current Albemarle Commonwealth’s Attorney, told my parents that I was in a crowd of 500 people at the intersection of University Avenue and Emmett Street and that I was throwing rocks and bottles at the police. That was a complete fabrication. I never even got close to the intersection and I did not assault anyone. My parents did not have the faith in me that the Newsom’s have in their son and so they believed that big fat liar, the Commonwealth’s Attorney. Anything that Jim Camblos or the police claim that boy said should be viewed with great suspicion.
Because without the means to carry out this little plan (that is, physical evidence) it’s just some kid talking big.
What if he’d confessed that he and his friends were going to acquire some uranium and 228 centrifuges from Russia and, over the course of the next few months, enrich it, build a nuclear bomb, and overthrow the United States? Should he have been charged with treason and terrorism? Or laughed at?
What if this was a 5-year-old who’d made the same confession? Still without the means—do we charge him? Or laugh at him?
Maybe if he’d also had the means he’d be facing 10 years in prison, and this sentence is the result of the judge considering that he had no way to pull this off. OTOH, maybe his sentence is the same as if they’d found physical evidence that there was some actual plan and some means of killing people.
There’s no need to hold off on an arrest and an investigation when faced with a claim this serious. But a conviction? I don’t know about that.
Liesel Nowak reports that the quote from the kid came from a conversation that was hypothetical in nature:
This is the same judge who let Vernon Howard off. He was one of the ringleaders of the infamous teen assault gang. There was no question that he violently assaulted a young woman on Grady Avenue and that he selected her because she was a young white woman. This was made clear in the courtroom. Judge Whitlock sentenced him to probabtion.
I wish the entire transcript of yesterday’s proceedings was available online because if the slant in the Daily Progress is accurate, then a great injustice has happened.
This is not to suggest that the threats should not have been taken seriously because it does appear that the 16 year old who pleaded guilty may, indeed, have been the rare situation where an attack might have actually happpened.
We should all hope that correct police procedures were at least followed post-arrest with the 8th graders although I am not optimistic about that.
Wait a minute. This is the same teenager who won $150,000 for the school taking away his NRA T-Shirt? I must have been out to lunch, or spilling my Christian’s/Sylvia’s pizza on The Hook.
http://www.wina.com/page.php?category_id=355
It would be incredibly disturbing if the judge made this conviction based on a transcript and not a recording. The latter is disturbing enough without any physical evidence whatsoever that they had the means (or were attempting to acquire the means) to carry out the threats.
But to me, the most disturbing piece regarding the intent of the police and prosecution is brought to light by this paragraph in the Progress article (and kudos to Nowak for a well-organized piece):
Early on in the case, Newsom said, his son was originally charged with simply communicating a threat. Another juvenile court judge dismissed the charge and within an hour, police brought the two new, more serious felonies.
With this new information and keeping in mind what’s been said in past articles about his internet postings (and/or emails) it sounds to me like this kid’s essentially been convicted of the internet equivalent of shouting “fire” in a movie theater.
Perhaps that’s a bad analogy, but I don’t think so.
I think it’s a bad analogy. Shouting fire in a crowded movie theater (it has to be a crowded one–an empty one doesn’t work) is more like inciting a riot through words. You use your words to cause other people to commit actions (panic, running) that lead to people getting hurt. And, keep in mind, the court decided that this kind of speech is not protected. It’s not okay to use your words to incite other people to commit violent actions.
In the Newsom kid’s case, it’s not about incitement to riot or violence, as I understand it. It’s about him planning with another kid to commit acts of violence. It’s not about speech; it’s about planning. Now, you can dispute how serious Newsom really was about the plan, of course, and it does sound like the Hawranke kid was much more serious than Newsom. But this case wasn’t about freedom of speech (that was what his t-shirt case was all about). This case is about a conspiracy to do something bad.
I was just listening to Spencer Hawes on WINA and according to him, parents have no right to demand a lawyer for their child. The child has to make that request for him/herself. Also according to Hawes, Alan Newsome went to talk with the police voluntarily with a parent(s) and when his parent requested a lawyer, he was denied. Who thinks this is ok?
And was it necessary to involve Alan Newsome and the two 8th graders in order to protect the community from the kid who may have been on a dangerous path?
This is pure rumor but there are stories that other minors called in to talk to the police about this case were not allowed to have a parent in the room while they were being questioned- kids who were never charged with anything. Does anyone know if those parents were legally obligated to bring their child to the police station and then be separated from their children?
Cecil 2 wrote:
I understand your point.
The point I was trying to get at (having not been privy to any of the evidence) was that if I posted on my ‘myspace’ profile how cool it would be to blow up my high school and got a few responses from like minded kids, even if I never seriously planned on doing anything, and it never went beyond fantasizing. That based on this case (like shouting fire in the crowded theater) it’s not protected speech (again keeping in mind that by simply posting and maybe sharing a few emails I have absolutely no plans to act on the fantasy).
And yes it should go without saying that someone who might engage in this type of fantasy might need counseling.
My point being the internet is a different sort of place than a crowded movie theater… incitement to riot (due to the public and yet very personal nature of the communication medium) on the internet might very well take on the appearance of a conspiracy.
But this is all just me saying, “hmm something else to think about,” in a navel gazing sorta way. :)
And no I don’t participate in myspace.
Parents have no right to demand a lawyer for their minor children? Where are all the people protesting this, the ones who believe that minors should not have access to birth control or abortion without parental consent?
The law says parents are responsible for the acts of their minor children. So in a sense the parents would be getting a lawyer for themselves.
By the way, few know that the “fire in a crowded theater” statement in full from the Court decision makes reference to those “Who would FALSELY shout fire in a crowded theater.”