Disabled Boy Catches Bullies in the Act on Camera, Charged with Wiretapping

**This story is a couple weeks old and couldn't find it in search so please alert me to page if already reported.**

Boy in Pennsylvania uses his school issued iPad in class to catch his bullies on tape. Police are contacted, but only after the school deleted the recording. Boy was then charged with felony wiretapping due to recording in a place with an expectation of privacy. Charge later reduced to disorderly conduct, but bullies were never punished.

Link

Boy's lawyer:

"We’ve shown that there’s a legitimate purpose for the recording. And there’s no physically offensive or hazardous condition that was created by this recording. I don’t see how a recording of students that are bullying my client could be physically offensive or dangerous to anyone, other than potentially the people that are bullying my client."

More proof that common sense is truly a rare gift. I understand a law is a law, but you can't act like there isn't a valid reason for it and while it didn't result in anything positive for the boy or the entire situation...it should have. Instead we have a kid just trying to attend school, who due to bullies (that went unpunished) can't get the full educational experience, and ends up with a felony charged against him. Meanwhile the school apparently tries to hide the evidence? This situation was not handled correctly by the school.

This is ignorant.

It would have worked out better for the boy if he beat them with the I pad.

Tired of ignorant laws. Our system us and has been broken for a long time.

originally posted by: liejunkie01
This is ignorant.

It would have worked out better for the boy if he beat them with the I pad.

Okay, you reminded me of this. It's only 33 seconds long.

a reply to: Dawnbreaker

Boy was then charged with felony wiretapping due to recording in a place with an expectation of privacy

I have a reasonable expectation of privacy talking on my phone at home....but we all know that's not the case.

originally posted by: liejunkie01
This is ignorant.

It would have worked out better for the boy if he beat them with the I pad.

Tired of ignorant laws. Our system us and has been broken for a long time.

The school would have billed him for the damage to the iPad.

But it's OK for the NSA to tap every call we make and every email we write.There is no longer any justice in this world.What's right no longer is and what's wrong is.It's a sad state for society.

Posted here:
www.abovetopsecret.com...

End note the police dropped charges on this kid..

originally posted by: BlueSkyes
Update
triblive.com...

“No one in our office who was authorized to give advice on wiretap issues or school conduct issues was ever contacted in this matter,” Mike Manko, a spokesman for Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr., said in a statement. “We have made multiple attempts to contact the officer who wrote the citation. Those attempts have been unsuccessful. It is our intention to withdraw the citation on April 29 because we do not believe his conduct rises to the level of a citation.”


I guess if I was the cop I woulda went awol as well...

That's ok. Let's make him feel bad, tie up his families life with bs so he can come back to the school in 6 years and shoot it up. The System sucks.

bad post

Wow.. Really??? Have we come to this low point of shame and dark corruption, that we're hanging a kid out to dry by turning him from victim to aggressor somehow???

WHAT expectation of privacy? They mean on the PUBLIC school grounds? Also.. WHAT expectation of privacy when one of the direct participants to the event in question IS the one recording it?? My state makes that distinction for ONE party consent of personal, telephone or other form of recording. ONE person involved DOES have to know, but no one else needs to. As it should be, in my opinion.

This one hits a nerve because we're in the opening rounds of a very similar issue with our own school distirct and their seeming disconnect in perception of their own power vs. black letter law and established constitutional principle/precedent.

Parents....please please please do ONE thing, as I noticed had never been done in this story. Hammer into your kids what those 1st 10 amendments are and how they apply in today's world, with today's law. Not ideal ways they SHOULD work, but how they really DO work. I.E...... Kids can also say

"I'm sorry, I'm invoking my 5th amendment right at this time and will have no further discussion with you or anyone else regarding this matter until I have had benefit of legal counsel to consult with"

Tell your kids, if you tell them that much, not to EVER be pushy or snarky or crappy about saying that. Simply be cold, professional, FIRM..and don't let any threat or intimidation (they come next in this scenario) push them off that 'cool, calm insistent repeating of their right to remain silent on the matter of the moment'.

Kids have rights too...and I wonder..if the school hadn't broken the law by tampering with evidence, or destruction of private property (Intellectual rights for created video are actionable in court. His age didn't change that being his property as a created work, to be technical, as I understand this), would this have been pled down? Would the kid have had a hope of mercy...had the school not violated his rights? There is something VERY VERY wrong with cases like this.

We don't ASK authority for rights...We exercise rights which come from ABOVE those who would seek to deny them. That principle is what a kid HAS to keep in mind..when all alone..and simply telling VERY VERY angry adults, he won't speak against his own interests by being forced to.

How about the expectation of my child's safety? Expectation of privacy? When I was a kid and you got caught passing a note the teacher made you read it out loud. If a teacher was a read a text message of a student today they would be fired most likely.

The system sucks. It just shows that just as the legal system is designed to protect the criminal not the person attacked it is filtering to our children to make them complacent also.

a reply to: Dawnbreaker

Our justice system sucks. Sometimes I swear the laws have been made to protect the guilty instead of the innocent.

There's a federal law which protects special needs students if they should happen to bring a weapon into school. They get protected by a law called 'IDEA" (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) and it makes it nearly impossible to remove them from the school environment. The concept behind this law, is they don't understand what their doing, so they can't be held accountable. So the only time they will be removed is when they actually kill or maim a student, but then the damage has already been done.

To begin with, whomever deleted the video should be fired. Literally "burning the evidence" in any dispute is a clear sign of ill intent -- I'm guessing whomever did it probably was intentionally defending one of the kids that were bullying.

Secondly, I have a reasonable expectation of privacy if I were in someone else's private home or my own private home or on a private college campus or in a private business, but if that someone else pulled out a weapon and attacked me, I would certainly hope to be recording it and it would be allowed by the law and as evidence regardless of the place where something occurred. Expectation of privacy means walmart cannot record you going to the bathroom. It does not mean that an individual cannot record their own life experience; there is a caveat to that, if the experience is in an area which by-law is private (e.g. classified military, or you've signed a contract not to record in that area).

Thirdly, this overlaps with some just-as-disturbing recent bills where essentially corps are trying to make it so under no conditions, including actual abuse, illegal activities or embezzlement, is anybody allowed at any time to record anything such as for example cattle processing corporations. The idea being apparently that if we arrange it legally so that people exposing illegal activity become the criminals, then all those pesky troubles like whistleblowers will go away. This is very disturbing because this isn't about saying, "We made everyone sign a contract, they violated it, we're suing them for breach of contract," it is basically saying, "We want the government to make laws that specially act as our corporate mafia FOR us, against the people."

I would think that if the kid was recording his experience, he probably was already suffering bullying and nothing was being done about it since likely the bullies said "We didn't do that, he's lying!" So that he actually recorded it, only to have someone in authority delete the evidence and then try to get him prosecuted for daring record it, is really over the top. I would wish him well in his lawsuit, but of course that just means the people at fault likely aren't hurt at all, but the taxpayers are since it's a public school.

It is the same here in the UK. It doesn't really matter about the cops behaviour the evidence concerned may just have been proof or vindication of the situation in the hope that the school will protect him. It just shows the schools priorities and it certainly isn't student welfare. Why would the school not respond to the evidence rather than delete it? For some strange reason schools protect bullies. Not only that but if the victim is driven to retaliate then more often than not it is they who suffer the the consequences...from both bully and school.

If the authorities actually used the technologies available to attack, reduce and eliminate criminal behavior, they would no longer have a job.

Not entirely on topic, but does anyone really think that school shootings happen because there are too many guns?, really?...

Immature people should not have access to deadly force, because they might just go out and kill the bullies which make their lives miserable, but then a victim uses something other than deadly force or violence and the school authorities and police actually charge the victim?.

I would have to say these things happen to preserve job security...maybe...I don't know for sure, but it seems schools are there to make people more stupid than they already were.