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> Until that point, his only brush with the law was a temporary restraining order two years earlier. > "He started threatening me, saying that he would kill me

> Until that point, his only brush with the law was a temporary restraining order two years earlier. > "He started threatening me, saying that he would kill me. ... I told the school officers, [and] they started watching him really closely. He would say that he would shoot up the school." So I'll start by playing Devil's Advocate very briefly. It's interesting how facts can be shaped with different language ("his only brush with the law"): it appears the restraining order from two years prior related to similar threats to those alleged in the Facebook comments (although in a remarkably different context). Now that notwithstanding, it seems there are many glaring issues, both ethical and legal, with the way this has been handled. Based on a screenshot of a Facebook comment without context or verification from Facebook an 18 year-old was detained for months without trial, including his 19th birthday, and offered a plea bargain of 8 years jail (!). An unaffordable bail of $500k was set, and if not for media attention, pro bono counsel, and a generous anonymous donor he would still be detained. During his detention he was repeatedly sexually assaulted, withheld legal counsel, and coerced to confess with false promises of freedom. After media focus an offer of 10 years (!) probation was put forward. On a technical note, the original warrant included false testimony (matching of the Facebook profile picture to a driver's licence when the accused did not have a licence) and the indictment misquoted the original Facebook comment. How does anyone think this is reasonable?

jessedhillon 13y ago
Important to point out, re the restraining order, that according to the article he wasn't given the opportunity to respond to the charges made against him. Restraining orders aren't convictions, I am surprised that it seems they can be used as evidence given that they apparently do not imply any finding of fact.
- spacemanmatt 13y ago
  In a witch hunt, a lack of evidence implies a cover-up. A piece of non-evidence becomes a smoking gun. We've lost our heads.
Fasebook 13y ago
Because I'm scared.
- mosselman 13y ago
  "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." I find the actions taken here infinitely more scary than facebook comment bullshit.
  - chilldream 13y ago
    The average person does not make a cost-benefit analysis for things like this because that would require admitting that the question is complicated, or must result in some risk of death. Instead they silently drop the cost half of the equation by telling themselves that 0% risk of death must be possible, and rationalize away the costs of such a delusion by ignoring cases like this, or figuring that the victim must have deserved it somehow (with the silent assumption that nothing like this could ever happen to them or their loved ones). In recent years Obama justified various state excesses by saying something like "You can't have 100% security and 100% privacy." My immediate thought was, "Well, that's vacuously true, because you can't have 100% security ever."
    - gknoy 13y ago
      I think it's more that most people operate on the (apparently mistaken) assumption that the police are here to __protect__ us, and to find out who is guilty, while also exercising discretion and not prosecuting people who, paraphrasing the article, meant no harm but acted like an asshole. Thus, people figure that it's "better to be safe than sorry", and assume that the police and justice system will Find The Truth and sort things out. Unfortunately, that's not the case: the job of the police seems to be to make a case, and when combined with the plea bargain system we have, it's basically a game of "how can we convict this guy". Do I think investigation was warranted? Sure. But it definitely seems like overreaction to treat this as a valid terrorist threat, rather than a kid (or adult) saying something mean and flippant. I also find it hard to believe that Facebook was "unable" to give details of the conversation. If the defense believes that the context (unshown in the screenshot) is important, I am surprised they can't subpoena the entire history of his actions in that timeframe, or of the threads he was posting in over that 48-hour period, and have an expert witness collect and show the context they say is so important.
bhitov 13y ago
> So I'll start by playing Devil's Advocate very briefly. It's interesting how facts can be shaped with different language ("his only brush with the law"): it appears the restraining order from two years prior related to similar threats to those alleged in the Facebook comments (although in a remarkably different context). IANAL but I'm reasonably confident that a restraining order he received as a minor would not be admissible as evidence in this case, and thus should be irrelevant to the prosecution.
- madaxe_again 13y ago
  It is, however, when you're subjected to Trial by Media.
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    Don't know about the USA, but here in Canada the media is also disallowed from discussing young offenders.
    - cjfont 13y ago
      He's no longer a minor, so does that still apply because he was a minor at the time it happened?
      - Pxtl 13y ago
        In Canada? Yup. The YOA is very expansive. For example, my neighborhood's most prolific tagger is in his mid-'20s and the press still isn't allowed to mention his name when he gets picked up for the nth time because he was previously arrested as a young offender. If they said "Joe Blow was arrested for writing tag X on an overpass" then everybody would know that Joe Blow is X and his young offenses of writing X on an overpass would be revealed. You absolutely cannot be tied to crimes you committed as a youth. This way, no matter how bad you screw up, you have a clean slate as an adult.
        WalterBright 13y ago
smrtinsert 13y ago
Well, people have children. The protection they feel must be absolute, and here is someone who threatening them. If someone came up to me on the street and screamed I'm going to fucking kill you, I wouldn't argue for his freedom of speech.
- vinkelhake 13y ago
  He didn't run up to someone in the street. But even so, would you argue for 8 years in prison for screaming at someone?
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    The thing is that a true threat, something that is directed and credible, and forces someone to actually protect themselves against it, can be rightly criminalized by the states. In other words, it isn't screaming at someone, it is a true and credible threat, that might be worth punishing relatively harshly. Let me put this another way. Suppose instead of screaming at someone the individual went up to the home of a black family and burned a cross on their sidewalk (so no tresspassing) at 2am, and left a piece of cardboard on their door saying "Watch out. We are coming for you!" That's a pretty classic terroristic threat in US history. It may consist entirely of expressive acts and no real property crime. Certainly that's worthy of significant punishment. Now this case doesn't even come close to that hypothetical and I think the differences are illustrative. It isn't specific. It isn't a threat directed at the target. It isn't disruptive by itself. So if the individual isn't taking any steps to make it happen, I think it really should fall in the category protected by Brandenburg v. Ohio. Indeed, if you read footnote 1 of that case, you will see that the speech at issue here was a lot less likely to cause imminent lawless action, was a lot less terroristic, and was a lot less credible than the speech found protected in that case.
- NhanH 13y ago
  And that's why context is important. This case is more similar to someone comes to the middle of a crowded park and just yell to the sky.
- will_brown 13y ago
rdtsc 13y ago
Another interesting point is when the system acts irrationally, this is not lost on psychopaths and those with evil and malicious intents. Knowing that a snapshot of a Facebook post taken out of context can land that person in jail for months is a goldmine opportunity for some people. This just adds to the list the other things could include: plant child porn on their machine, call the terrorist hotline with a tip, launch a flood of ssh port scans into a .mil address from their machine, and bam! easy peasy that person's life is ruined. This is not unlike the witch hunts in repressive regimes where people are encouraged to rat on each other. Quite often that is taken advantage. It used to be report the person to be a "Communist" or "report that person to be an Anti-Communist". Unless there is public and swift punishment for the prosecutors or the "professionals" in the chain of people this has passed through, this will repeat again and again. There is just very little incentive not to "keep going" with these tips. The potential repercussions for ignoring it could be much harsher. So why not...
- code_duck 13y ago
  A Facebook post out of context, heck... you could doctor the HTML using browser dev tools to make anyone appear to say anything at all on Facebook.
  - theOrthogonal 13y ago
    As a person who has sat on a grand jury, I can speak from personal experience, and let me tell you: Listening to pud-pulling detectives stumble through the technical details of correlating an IP address to a service provider, at the rehearsed prompts provided by power-tripping district attourneys, and then glancing across the 22 other grand jurors, some withed glazed eyes, and others desperately nodding in agreement, as if they had something to prove to the phantom presence of their usually condescending 13-year-old children about their technical savvy, and the relationship that holds with being able to read a cable bill, I was deeply disturbed by the very low bar that was set, in order to prove to the lowest common denomenator that someone committed a computer crime, when I was out-voted on a whether to bring a flimsy case to trial. Afterward, I casually chatted up each of the people that voted to bring a guy before the judge for allegedly creating fake credit cards and charging thousands of dollars under someone else's name, to gauge whether they understood what they had just voted on. Most of them had a hard time using their smart phones for anything besides phone calls, couldn't tell me what an IP address actually was, couldn't readily distinguish AOL dial up service and AOL keyword searches from "Googling the internet" or typing in a URL in their browsers address bar, and were mystified by the difference between typing up a Word document and attaching it to an e-mail, versus just typing and sending the e-mail itself. The difference between how quickly things went to trial, or how long we deliberated on a particular case often hinged on how close to 5PM it was. The DA's seemed to be aware of this, and the complexity and "appeal" of cases and the order of their presentation seemed to be planned accordingly.
Aloha 13y ago
I'm gonna point out, getting a TRO in many states is as easy as filling out a form, and paying a fee. All you need to do is state you feel threatened by someone.
einhverfr 13y ago
The ideal of a government of laws is just an illusion. We are a government of men and women who pull whatever crap they can get away with. This case was so badly botched even before one gets to free speech questions that one wonders why, at some point, the state didn't just admit error and agree to have the case dismissed. This reads like "let's see. There are 10 Amendments in the Bill of Rights. How many of them can we mess with? Now obviously we can't violate the 3rd, 9th, or 10th amendments here but maybe we can mess with the first, second, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eigth..." One wonders why they stopped at the Bill of Rights. Maybe they could get the city to pass a Bill of Attainder while they are at it. Maybe they could have gone for broke and asked the state to station national guardsmen in his bedroom on release?
elwell 13y ago
> Until that point, his only brush with the law was a temporary restraining order two years earlier. It doesn't have much to do with his danger anyways, as far as I'm concerned. Adam Lanza did not have a criminal record [0]. [0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_lanza#Perpetrator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_lanza#Perpetrator
yourapostasy 13y ago
Can you please link to the indictment you saw (which the grand jury also saw and true billed)? I couldn't find it with a quick glance at the Comal County Court at Law Portal (I only found a Register of Actions).
- nopassrecover 13y ago
  I'm only referring to this article where they make that claim and a brief google of other news articles where they make the same claim. It's quite possible the journalists have all made factual errors - I can't find the indictment either but I just assumed indictments aren't usually public.

jessedhillon 13y ago

Important to point out, re the restraining order, that according to the article he wasn't given the opportunity to respond to the charges made against him. Restraining orders aren't convictions, I am surprised that it seems they can be used as evidence given that they apparently do not imply any finding of fact.

spacemanmatt 13y ago
In a witch hunt, a lack of evidence implies a cover-up. A piece of non-evidence becomes a smoking gun. We've lost our heads.

Fasebook 13y ago

Because I'm scared.

mosselman 13y ago
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." I find the actions taken here infinitely more scary than facebook comment bullshit.
- chilldream 13y ago
  The average person does not make a cost-benefit analysis for things like this because that would require admitting that the question is complicated, or must result in some risk of death. Instead they silently drop the cost half of the equation by telling themselves that 0% risk of death must be possible, and rationalize away the costs of such a delusion by ignoring cases like this, or figuring that the victim must have deserved it somehow (with the silent assumption that nothing like this could ever happen to them or their loved ones). In recent years Obama justified various state excesses by saying something like "You can't have 100% security and 100% privacy." My immediate thought was, "Well, that's vacuously true, because you can't have 100% security ever."
  - gknoy 13y ago
    I think it's more that most people operate on the (apparently mistaken) assumption that the police are here to __protect__ us, and to find out who is guilty, while also exercising discretion and not prosecuting people who, paraphrasing the article, meant no harm but acted like an asshole. Thus, people figure that it's "better to be safe than sorry", and assume that the police and justice system will Find The Truth and sort things out. Unfortunately, that's not the case: the job of the police seems to be to make a case, and when combined with the plea bargain system we have, it's basically a game of "how can we convict this guy". Do I think investigation was warranted? Sure. But it definitely seems like overreaction to treat this as a valid terrorist threat, rather than a kid (or adult) saying something mean and flippant. I also find it hard to believe that Facebook was "unable" to give details of the conversation. If the defense believes that the context (unshown in the screenshot) is important, I am surprised they can't subpoena the entire history of his actions in that timeframe, or of the threads he was posting in over that 48-hour period, and have an expert witness collect and show the context they say is so important.

bhitov 13y ago

> So I'll start by playing Devil's Advocate very briefly. It's interesting how facts can be shaped with different language ("his only brush with the law"): it appears the restraining order from two years prior related to similar threats to those alleged in the Facebook comments (although in a remarkably different context). IANAL but I'm reasonably confident that a restraining order he received as a minor would not be admissible as evidence in this case, and thus should be irrelevant to the prosecution.

madaxe_again 13y ago
It is, however, when you're subjected to Trial by Media.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  Don't know about the USA, but here in Canada the media is also disallowed from discussing young offenders.
  - cjfont 13y ago
    He's no longer a minor, so does that still apply because he was a minor at the time it happened?
    - Pxtl 13y ago
      In Canada? Yup. The YOA is very expansive. For example, my neighborhood's most prolific tagger is in his mid-'20s and the press still isn't allowed to mention his name when he gets picked up for the nth time because he was previously arrested as a young offender. If they said "Joe Blow was arrested for writing tag X on an overpass" then everybody would know that Joe Blow is X and his young offenses of writing X on an overpass would be revealed. You absolutely cannot be tied to crimes you committed as a youth. This way, no matter how bad you screw up, you have a clean slate as an adult.
      - WalterBright 13y ago

smrtinsert 13y ago

Well, people have children. The protection they feel must be absolute, and here is someone who threatening them. If someone came up to me on the street and screamed I'm going to fucking kill you, I wouldn't argue for his freedom of speech.

vinkelhake 13y ago
He didn't run up to someone in the street. But even so, would you argue for 8 years in prison for screaming at someone?
- einhverfr 13y ago
  The thing is that a true threat, something that is directed and credible, and forces someone to actually protect themselves against it, can be rightly criminalized by the states. In other words, it isn't screaming at someone, it is a true and credible threat, that might be worth punishing relatively harshly. Let me put this another way. Suppose instead of screaming at someone the individual went up to the home of a black family and burned a cross on their sidewalk (so no tresspassing) at 2am, and left a piece of cardboard on their door saying "Watch out. We are coming for you!" That's a pretty classic terroristic threat in US history. It may consist entirely of expressive acts and no real property crime. Certainly that's worthy of significant punishment. Now this case doesn't even come close to that hypothetical and I think the differences are illustrative. It isn't specific. It isn't a threat directed at the target. It isn't disruptive by itself. So if the individual isn't taking any steps to make it happen, I think it really should fall in the category protected by Brandenburg v. Ohio. Indeed, if you read footnote 1 of that case, you will see that the speech at issue here was a lot less likely to cause imminent lawless action, was a lot less terroristic, and was a lot less credible than the speech found protected in that case.
NhanH 13y ago
And that's why context is important. This case is more similar to someone comes to the middle of a crowded park and just yell to the sky.
will_brown 13y ago

rdtsc 13y ago

Another interesting point is when the system acts irrationally, this is not lost on psychopaths and those with evil and malicious intents. Knowing that a snapshot of a Facebook post taken out of context can land that person in jail for months is a goldmine opportunity for some people. This just adds to the list the other things could include: plant child porn on their machine, call the terrorist hotline with a tip, launch a flood of ssh port scans into a .mil address from their machine, and bam! easy peasy that person's life is ruined. This is not unlike the witch hunts in repressive regimes where people are encouraged to rat on each other. Quite often that is taken advantage. It used to be report the person to be a "Communist" or "report that person to be an Anti-Communist". Unless there is public and swift punishment for the prosecutors or the "professionals" in the chain of people this has passed through, this will repeat again and again. There is just very little incentive not to "keep going" with these tips. The potential repercussions for ignoring it could be much harsher. So why not...

code_duck 13y ago
A Facebook post out of context, heck... you could doctor the HTML using browser dev tools to make anyone appear to say anything at all on Facebook.
- theOrthogonal 13y ago
  As a person who has sat on a grand jury, I can speak from personal experience, and let me tell you: Listening to pud-pulling detectives stumble through the technical details of correlating an IP address to a service provider, at the rehearsed prompts provided by power-tripping district attourneys, and then glancing across the 22 other grand jurors, some withed glazed eyes, and others desperately nodding in agreement, as if they had something to prove to the phantom presence of their usually condescending 13-year-old children about their technical savvy, and the relationship that holds with being able to read a cable bill, I was deeply disturbed by the very low bar that was set, in order to prove to the lowest common denomenator that someone committed a computer crime, when I was out-voted on a whether to bring a flimsy case to trial. Afterward, I casually chatted up each of the people that voted to bring a guy before the judge for allegedly creating fake credit cards and charging thousands of dollars under someone else's name, to gauge whether they understood what they had just voted on. Most of them had a hard time using their smart phones for anything besides phone calls, couldn't tell me what an IP address actually was, couldn't readily distinguish AOL dial up service and AOL keyword searches from "Googling the internet" or typing in a URL in their browsers address bar, and were mystified by the difference between typing up a Word document and attaching it to an e-mail, versus just typing and sending the e-mail itself. The difference between how quickly things went to trial, or how long we deliberated on a particular case often hinged on how close to 5PM it was. The DA's seemed to be aware of this, and the complexity and "appeal" of cases and the order of their presentation seemed to be planned accordingly.

Aloha 13y ago

I'm gonna point out, getting a TRO in many states is as easy as filling out a form, and paying a fee. All you need to do is state you feel threatened by someone.

einhverfr 13y ago

The ideal of a government of laws is just an illusion. We are a government of men and women who pull whatever crap they can get away with. This case was so badly botched even before one gets to free speech questions that one wonders why, at some point, the state didn't just admit error and agree to have the case dismissed. This reads like "let's see. There are 10 Amendments in the Bill of Rights. How many of them can we mess with? Now obviously we can't violate the 3rd, 9th, or 10th amendments here but maybe we can mess with the first, second, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eigth..." One wonders why they stopped at the Bill of Rights. Maybe they could get the city to pass a Bill of Attainder while they are at it. Maybe they could have gone for broke and asked the state to station national guardsmen in his bedroom on release?

elwell 13y ago

> Until that point, his only brush with the law was a temporary restraining order two years earlier. It doesn't have much to do with his danger anyways, as far as I'm concerned. Adam Lanza did not have a criminal record [0]. [0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_lanza#Perpetrator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_lanza#Perpetrator

yourapostasy 13y ago

Can you please link to the indictment you saw (which the grand jury also saw and true billed)? I couldn't find it with a quick glance at the Comal County Court at Law Portal (I only found a Register of Actions).

nopassrecover 13y ago
I'm only referring to this article where they make that claim and a brief google of other news articles where they make the same claim. It's quite possible the journalists have all made factual errors - I can't find the indictment either but I just assumed indictments aren't usually public.