Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Careful With That Essay:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_04_29-2007_05_05.shtml#1177796961
The [1]Chicago Tribune reports:
A Cary-Grove High School student charged with disorderly conduct
for writing a violently descriptive class essay had received an
[2]assignment that said: "Write whatever comes to your mind. Do not
judge or censor what you are writing." ...
[Allen] Lee's English teacher, Nora Capron, and school officials
found the senior's stream-of-consciousness writing so alarming that
they turned it over to Cary police, who arrested him Tuesday
morning while he was walking to school.
Carroll said the complaint against Lee quotes his essay as saying:
"Blood, sex and booze. Drugs, drugs, drugs are fun. Stab, stab,
stab, stab, stab, s ... t ... a ... b ..., puke. So I had this
dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P90s
and started shooting everyone, then had sex with the dead bodies.
Well, not really, but it would be funny if I did."
According to Carroll, another passage said, "as a teacher, don't be
surprised on inspiring the first CG shooting."
Carroll said the two misdemeanor counts of disorderly conduct in
the amended complaint filed Thursday refer to both passages....
Lee's essay, written in class Monday, also refers to lyrics from a
song by the band Green Day and violent images from a Super Mario
Bros. video game, according to Jamie Emling, a close friend of
Lee's who is in the same creative-writing class....
It may well be quite reasonable for a high school to look closely at
someone who writes this sort of essay, and even suspend him while
they're evaluating him. Sometimes off-the-cuff writing, even seemingly
fictional writing, may offer a window into what someone is really
thinking. Writing such material in high schools -- or even colleges --
these days is also pretty poor judgment.
But it seems to me that treating the essay as a criminally punishable
threat, especially when it's written as a response to a writing
assignment that expressly calls on people to write unpolished,
unthought-through, and quite possibly fictional prose, is rather an
overreaction, even despite the most troubling element of the essay,
"as a teacher, don't be surprised on inspiring the first CG shooting."
It's also probably an unconstitutional overreaction, as the
[3]Wisconsin Supreme Court held in the very similar In re Douglas D.
(2001) (though see, for a different result on somewhat different
facts, In re George T., 126 Cal.Rptr.2d 364 (Cal. App. 2002)). That
someone's speech bears investigation, or even school discipline,
doesn't mean that it ought to be criminally punished.
References
1.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-070426essay-update,1,1939754.story?coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=2&cset=true
2.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-070426writing-photo,1,201388.photo?coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true
3.
http://www.wicourts.gov/sc/opinion/DisplayDocument.html?content=html&seqNo=17531
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