Posted on 12/07/2007 8:23:13 AM PST by Sopater
Prosecutors in Wisconsin on Wednesday decided not to press charges against a teacher who praised the Columbine High School shooters in a blog comment intended to make conservatives look bad. The decision drew praise from the conservative blogger the teacher had hoped to smear.
Washington County (Wisconsin) District Attorney Todd Martens announced Wednesday he would not pursue a case against James Buss, who posted comments on the blog Boots and Sabers that were laudatory of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who carried out the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, in which 12 students and one teacher were killed and 23 people wounded.
"Weve (sic) got to get in back of the kids who have had enough of lazy, no good teachers and are fighting back," the commenter "Observer" said in a response to a post about teachers' salaries. "Kids like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold members (sic) of the Young Republicans club at Columbine."
"They knew how to deal with the overpaid teacher union thugs. One shot at a time!," the commenter said. "Too bad liberls (sic) rip them; they were heros (sic) and should be remembred (sic) that way."
Police, tipped off to the comment by a West Bend School District employee, traced the Internet Protocol (IP) address assigned to "Observer's" computer and arrested Buss on Nov. 29.
He could have faced charges of disorderly conduct and unlawful use of computerized communications systems. But Martens concluded that the "patently offensive speech" was protected by the First Amendment.
Owen Robinson, operator of Boots and Sabers, praised the decision even though he had been the target of Buss' satirical comments. Buss told investigators his goal "was parroting anti-teacher statements he has heard on radio programs to see if any anti-teacher readers would agree with him."
"For me, the arrest is kind of dubious," Robinson told Cybercast News Service Thursday. "I am happy that the DA decided not to press charges against him."
"I believe in robust speech, robust debate, and I think that if we start going around arresting people because they engage in poorly thought out parody and ridiculous speech we'd have to arrest pretty much half of America and that's not a place we want to be," Robinson said, calling Buss' comment "idiotic and offensive."
"Now that we kind of know the whole story and what he was trying to accomplish I think, again, what he did was stupid, but I'm fairly certain the First Amendment doesn't delineate between stupid and intelligent speech," Robinson said. "It protects it all."
Robert Bluey, director of the Center for Media and Public Policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the incident serves a reminder that "any time you post a comment on the Internet ... there's always a risk of it being exposed, especially when you're dealing with political subjects or, in this case, something as sensitive as Columbine."
Bluey, who works to connect the 34-year-old Heritage Foundation and the conservative principles it furthers with the new media "blogosphere," said he wasn't surprised that Robinson would back Buss. "For the most part, I've found that bloggers definitely come down more on the side of free speech," he said.
"Bloggers themselves are acting as communicators," Bluey said. "They're more likely to come down on the side of free speech than, in this particular case, having somebody go to jail."
He suggested that the hostile atmosphere of blogging in the United States is a product of the perspective that blogs are good for advancing a political or social agenda.
"You're going there to advance a particular agenda, and I think that sometimes you can really get carried away," Bluey said, "and that's why before anybody hits that submit button they have to realize there can be consequences."
Agree.
Free speech most important when stupid people say stupid and despicable things.
Nary a news source mentions that the guy was likely a liberal troll and just trying to get a rise out of other posters.
It could have been a “ruse”. After all, he was assuming the persona of his impression of a red-neck conservative.
Why do the Liberals do it? Well, actual racist incidents (white against black, anyway) have become much rarer than they used to be -- and how can we continue to believe we're a racist society, if racist acts are so rare??
Liberals are just picking up the slack. For the children.
He's preparing his resumé and portfolio to teach at Duke University. It makes perfect sense
No need to bring his grandma into this...;^)
Isn’t criminal, but is it IS a basis to fire the clown.
Next time some 3rd grader gets busted for drawing a gun on a piece of paper he should claim he was just trying to get that smartass conservative kid in trouble.
So this liberal teacher went to a conservative blog pretending to be a conservative and posted vile and nasty garbage.
All so he could direct his teacher friends to the conservative website to read the vile and nasty garbage that those vile and nasty conservatives post there...which was him.
I think you meant “grammar” but maybe you did that on purpose.
I agree he should be fired.
My biggest problem is that if this guy was conservative he would likely be charged because it would be assumed that he meant it. Of course, it is also assumed that this liberal didn’t mean it.
The action is not the crime, it is the assumed intent.
Please tell me that this twisted freak isn’t going to be allowed back in a classroom with children.
Since the poster was not presenting himself as himself, I presume the grammar and spelling errors were intentional—examples of the rhetorical devices of enallage and barbarismus, respectively.
Grammar.
I think that’s spelled “grammar”.
I’m pretty sure that there are people who are in jail today for “speech crimes” that were not as extreme as this teacher’s insidious comments. I don’t know where they draw the line at free speech/speech crime.
By the way, has Bill O’Reilly covered this story and called the blog where the teacher posted a “hate site”?
Yeah, while I would stand in line for hours to kick this guy in the stones, I couldn’t believe that he was arrested in the first place. If saying stupid stuff on the internet is a crime, then I suppose that a great many of us who post of FR would have felony records by now. The 1st Amendment was meant to protect unpopular speech, popular speech needs no such protections by definition. What constitutes popular speech changes with the times and the crowd though.
Police, tipped off to the comment by a West Bend School District employee, traced the Internet Protocol (IP) address assigned to "Observer's" computer and arrested Buss on Nov. 29.
The fact of the matter is you can be arrested for free speech in America.
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