

Teen Jailed For Facebook Comment Reportedly Beat Up Behind Bars - socalnate1
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/07/03/198129617/teen-jailed-for-facebook-comment-reportedly-beat-up-behind-bars

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jkeel
I dislike that in the article they removed the context of his statement. Just
reading this, it sounds like he was making a threat, but if you read the
KHOU.com (Houston) article it appears that here's merely mocking the person
who is calling him insane.

[http://www.khou.com/news/texas-news/Texas-teen-charged-
with-...](http://www.khou.com/news/texas-news/Texas-teen-charged-with-making-
terroristic-threat-after-online-joke-212931111.html)

NPR version: "I think Ima shoot up a kindergarten / And watch the blood of the
innocent rain down/ And eat the beating heart of one of them."

KHOU version: 'Oh you're insane, you're crazy, you're messed up in the head,’
to which he replied 'Oh yeah, I'm real messed up in the head, I'm going to go
shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts,’ and the
next two lines were lol and jk.,"

~~~
watty
I think he crossed the line of "merely mocking". Stating something so non-
funny and grotesque shortly after a elementary school shooting on a public
facebook page is idiotic. Not only is it stupid but he also a young white male
(and appears to lack common sense) - why shouldn't it be considered a threat?

Edit - I never said he deserved jail time or the ridiculous bail. I'm simply
stating that his words on a public medium should be taken seriously and looked
into. I'd expect the same from bomb threats or other terrorist activities.

Devils advocate - if an American Islamist made a comment about bombing ______
but then stated "jk", is it crossing the line? What if they were radical?

It's a slippery slope and I'm not a judge. I'm simply stating that I believe
he crossed the line and I'm glad someone looked into it. No, he doesn't
deserve to be in jail.

~~~
DanBC
Why does it matter that he's young, white, or male?

Most people agree that it's stupid and deeply offensive to make that kind of
comment.

Where people disagree is with a $500,000 bond; and with a prison sentence; and
with jail time; for something that's no more nor less stupid that the stupid
shit children do _every single day_.

EDIT: For the cost spent on him so far we could have shown him his comment,
put it in the context of a recent school shooting, explained that some people
are scared by that stuff, shown him the costs and process involved in checking
if he's a terrorist about to kill a bunch of children and EAT THEIR BEATING
HEARTS, asked him to consider his language in public in future, and asked him
to talk to the woman making the complaint so she can see he's not going to
kill children and he can apologise for scaring her.

That way you get a young man who stands a chance at getting a job in future
(because felony convictions tend to affect what people can do) and who doesn't
hate law enforcement.

Obviously it doesn't work for everyone, and when it doesn't work you use
further measures. Luckily, by doing a bit of triage you have less people in
prison and more money to spend rehabilitating them.

~~~
watty
I don't disagree - simply stated the crossed the line. I would expect someone
to look into a bomb threat followed by "jk" as well.

~~~
mikeash
"Look into" does not imply "put the person in jail".

~~~
pyre
But we have to find some way to justify the expense. E.g.:

    
    
      Look! All that money we spend was well spent! We
      found a terrorist!

------
jamieb
"We have to...protect the general public and specifically, in this case, with
it involving school children, we have to act."

This is disgusting. If someone says what he did it means one of two things:

1\. He really meant it, and is about to go out and eat children.

2\. He was being creative in a public medium.

It should be immediately obvious that in this case, we are dealing with
situation #2 and the boy should be released. I am of the opinion that the
burden of proof means that police should not be allowed to arrest someone even
in the case of #1 unless there is more than just a public statement. It
beggars belief that after discovering the facts in this case that the police
still have him in custody.

This law must be found unconstitutional as soon as possible.

------
samatman
In middle school, I was assigned to write a parody. What I wrote was a parody
of the Night before Christmas, in which a male student brought weapons to
school and shot among other people the principle. This was pre-Columbine, mind
you.

I was called into the Principle's office; he explained that he didn't take it
personally, because he knows what parody is, but that they wanted to make sure
everything was okay at home and that the other students weren't bullying me.

I got an A.

~~~
segmondy
You wanna what is also crazy? If you had been serious. The principals action
in that case could have actually changed your mind. A lot of times for some of
these kids that are about to lose their mind. Just knowing that someone cares
puts an end to the blooming insanity.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Kindness takes more effort than fear.

------
pyre
I wonder what today's world would think of "A Modest Proposal" or even
"Lolita?" Works that are now considered good literature would, were they
published today, see their authors vilified, (possibly) tortured, and jailed
by an extremely paranoid public in a manner befitting the height of Soviet
Russia (i.e. "Report your neighbour, comrade!").

~~~
JonSkeptic
Actually, if A Modest Proposal was published today it would be taken literally
by the general populace, acknowledged as good, satirical reading by a few, and
then it would be promptly ignored by every major news outlet because they
would be too busy talking about Snowden's girlfriend or Paula Deen.

~~~
pyre
Are you sure that eating children wouldn't be regarded as "making a threat"
and the author jailed?

------
bmmayer1
This is a shame. The incentives for law enforcement are completely misaligned.
Of course they will always want to be seen as "doing something" and never want
to take the chance that someone's threats, real or fake, ever get carried out.
But we are so hysterical about some form of terror _maybe_ happening that we
completely ignore the state terror that _is_ happening. This isn't worth the
imprisonment of our citizens for thoughtcrime!

------
dmazin
By the way, at least in California, $500,000 is the recommended bail for...
perjury? Threat of violence? Assault of a police officer? No: that's the
recommended bail for an attempted assassination of a public official using a
machine gun.

Presumably, the bond is this large because someone behind the case was afraid
the kid might attack the school. On the one hand, this is understandable
(though not excusable) because of previous events in that area. On the other,
this is what leads to thought police and such behavior from courts needs to be
destroyed at the core.

------
Fuxy
Wow ironic sarcasm is punishable with 10 years in prison I didn't know that. I
can tell even without seeing the context.

BTW doesn't this violate freedom of speech? The kid didn't commit any crime he
said some stupid things on Facebook as far as I know that shouldn't be a
punishable offense.

Or are we becoming like the Minority Report without the time travel?

------
leot
"Terroristic" \-- this whole concept is straight out of 1984. How is it
useful, legally?

What qualifies as "terroristic" and what doesn't? Does threatening to organize
an online sit-in count? If not, why?

I'm already censoring myself. Congratulations America.

------
jack-r-abbit
The bail is over the top. I don't know enough about what it takes for a charge
to be a felony or not. I do know that a lot of things straddle the line
between felony and not felony and then certain other factors can tip it one
way or the other. Not sure if this is the case here. I'm guessing the word
"terroristic" gets people all worked up since what he did is no where near
what we think of today as a "terrorist". But when you take that word back to
its root (and forget all the current political and emotional baggage it has
today) it is fitting. And as has been discussed before, the amount of jail
time cited in an article usually depends on the bias the article has. Stories
like this love to toss around the absolute max sentence that this level of
crime could bring. It makes the actions of legal system appear all the more
ridiculous. ("Wah? 10 years for a stupid Facebook post?") But stories the
other way (about some bad person getting off easy) like to throw around the
absolute minimum sentence. This also makes the legal system appear all the
more ridiculous. ("Wah? He could be out in as little as _some short time_ for
murder?") Even better is when they pair the two together and say that some
relatively minor offence has a max sentence of X, while some other horrific
offence can carry a sentence as little as Y (where X > Y).

I do love how we citizens love to second guess the actions (or inactions) of
law enforcement without ever actually being in their position of making the
decisions they have to make. Was this kid really going to do those things?
Probably not but we can't really say for sure ("clearly there was no threat"
is just an opinion). But if the police did nothing and then later he did it
(or even something equally sinister) we would have been all over them for not
seeing the warning signs or seeing and dismissing them.

------
DanBC
> "The whole situation is kind of unfortunate," said New Braunfels Police Lt.
> John Wells. "We definitely understand the situation that Mr. Carter is in,
> however he made the comments, and it is an offense. We have to ... protect
> the general public and specifically, in this case, with it involving
> schoolchildren, we have to act. We take those very seriously."

It's very tempting to start screen-shotting and reporting Xbox live (and all
the rest) comments.

The police have said that they take it very seriously, and that they have to
act. Perhaps law enforcement is not aware just how toxic some parts of the
online community is, and how many people they'd be locking up.

------
ams6110
The sad thing is, a video game scenario of shooting up a school is probably
perfectly legal.

~~~
sageikosa
You just can't talk about it.

------
jccc
A whole wall of posts about the law, the prosecutors, the bail -- not one
about this seemingly ordinary teenage kid stripped naked, held in solitary,
black-eyed and beaten to concussions in pre-trial confinement.

The law is what the police, the prosecutors and the general public can get
away with, and this prosecution is what we get when there is no skepticism or
accountability at all for those who carry out "the law."

But why is it that we never seem to care much about what happens to people in
jails? Is it just a given now, something so commonplace that we just can't get
worked up about it anymore?

If we can't have accountability for police and DA's can we at least have some
accountability for the variously careless, incompetent and/or sadistic
Mayberry's who run our prisons?

------
aeze
This is horrible, I really don't understand why such little reason has been
applied to this case.

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dendory
In a normal world, authorities would look at whether he has a motive to commit
a crime, means to do it such as having illicit firearms, and plans to do it
such as written statements.

In the fucked-up US of A, a sarcastic Facebook comment is enought to terrorize
people enough to send him to jail.

------
dagurp
A similar thing happened recently in the UK where a comedian was convicted for
telling a joke.

10 O'Clock Live's take on it: [http://youtu.be/d0aP-
dGbjzw?t=18m43s](http://youtu.be/d0aP-dGbjzw?t=18m43s)

------
tyrion
(Aaaand sometimes I hear people saying the Italian's Juridical System sucks.
Just saying)

------
gerhardi
Wow.. This so smells like North Korea. A bad joke here and there or getting
too tempered after bad game and the police throw you into jail. Of course I
hope that he really was just joking - I've even heard of video game rage that
has done some real harm and never I have heard that anyone was jailed.

~~~
nether
No, in the DPRK you and your family would be sent to labor camps and possibly
mass executed a few years later.

~~~
gerhardi
Sure, thats why it only smells like it. In this case only the boy is
imprisoned and beaten in jail and his parents are extorted for half a million
dollars to get their son back to safety.

~~~
incision
_>...extorted for half a million dollars to get their son back to safety._

[http://money.howstuffworks.com/bail.htm](http://money.howstuffworks.com/bail.htm)

~~~
jlgreco
You realize that making bail doesn't mean you don't have to go to trial,
right?

~~~
jack-r-abbit
I think s/he was simply pointing out that a "$500K bail" does not mean that
the kid's parents were extorted for half a mill. That is not how bail works.

