A middle school student who helped a friend draw a picture of a cartoon bomb should not have been convicted of making a terrorist threat, an appeals court judge has ruled.The boy, identified in court records only as A.N.G., was found delinquent on two counts in Waupaca County — disorderly conduct and making a terrorist threat, a felony — as a party to a crime.This week, Court of Appeals Judge Brian Blanchard ordered both adjudications vacated and the delinquency petition dismissed.The boy's "private drawing was not a true threat in the constitutional sense," Blanchard found, but rather the kind of expression protected by the First Amendment.
It seems silly to have to defend the drawing on First Amendment grounds. That it was a typical boy's drawing that identified no true threat to anyone should have been enough.
2 comments:
Oh my goodness--
All those pictures of tanks and WWII fighter planes I drew as a child would have me in the hoosegow for LIFE according to these nut-job administrators.
When I was a child we had a show on TV, Miss Pat's Playroom. Sometimes there were kids on it, but I never was. Miss Pat, among many other activities, would show pictures on TV! that children sent in. I remember when she showed "little Darren Miller's" picture of an airplane bombing a house.
No one from CPS showed up at our house, either!!
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