Article from Reason by Lenore Skenazy.
A 13-year-old hauled into the principal’s office for not serving his detention may end up with the biggest detention of all: a felony conviction. That’s because the kid recorded the conversation on his phone.
The incident took place last February at Manteno Middle School, which is about an hour outside of Chicago. Young Paul Boron was arguing with Principal David Conrad and Assistant Principal Nathan Short.
According to the Illinois Policy Center:
Two months later, in April, Boron was charged with one count of eavesdropping – a class 4 felony in Illinois.
Unfortunately for Boron, there is a law against recording people without their consent in Illinois. There’s even a rule against it in the student handbook. But the handbook also says that it is fine for the school to have video cameras monitoring the public areas of the building. In other words, it’s fine to keep the kids under constant surveillance, just not the administrators.
Read the entire article at Reason.
Image Credit:Â By Jamelle Bouie [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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Good for her. She apparently knows how crooked these American School Systems are. So she was just protecting herself. She should be commended for doing what she did not Arrested.
His defense (or should we say “self defense”) should be obvious. Also, the school failed to contact his parents before broadsiding the kid with both the principal and vice principal in a sting intended to make all kinds of false claims about what he said or didn’t say.
Well, Well, Well, Charging a 13 year old with a Felony! My understanding is that under 18 cannot consent to breaking the law. Strange how the law can be twisted to suit “adults”!
Does such situation in Illinois come as a surprise?
Laws are laws, I personally think the kid had every right to record a conversation he was personally involved in, but Illinois says it is illegal, and the school has rules about it also. The kid should not be expelled for it, and the law needs to be changed, but we can’t pick which laws we obey, and which we do not. I’m not surprised though that the most corrupt state in history has a law that prevents anyone from catching the leaders doing all the wrong they do on a daily basis there. No government is perfect, but Illinois, and especially Chicago is worse than the Soviet Union was.
When the democrats rule they make the laws protect the corrupt.