California Supreme Court to rule on poetic threats
Updated 27 July 2004: Court rules for George T. (at bottom of post)
Updated 25 May 2004: Added George’s poem.
Authorities look to high court in case of teen’s ‘dark poetry’
It was 2001 and ‘George T’ was having a bad time of school. He had a history of non-violent trouble and had recently been transfered to Santa Teresa High School. The 15 year old Honors English student expressed his teen angst through dark poetry. This would have been completely fine except he shared it with a fellow Honors student. That student reported him to the school and the school expelled him and turned him over to the juvenile court system.
For school officials and law enforcement, the case is seen as an opportunity for the state’s high court to provide guidance for when something a student has said or written should be sufficient to warrant a trip into the juvenile justice system. School officials have increasingly turned over cases of threatening behavior to police, prompting concerns among civil liberties groups that normal student expressions of inner turmoil are being treated like crimes instead of social and mental health problems.
Even prosecutors who deal with juveniles concede they will welcome some direction from the Supreme Court. Kurt Kumli, a deputy district attorney who supervises juvenile prosecutions in Santa Clara County, said he believes the law supports the conviction against George T., but he wonders whether it was the type of case that belongs in the criminal system.
George T is well represented and well supported. He has the backing of the ACLU, First Amendment advocates, poets such as JM Coetzee and Michael Chabon and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. He can definitely use the support as he has already lost his case at the local and appeals levels.
George T. has declined interviews. But he told authorities that he never intended to harm anyone, and that his poetry resulted from a “bad day.”
Nevertheless, a juvenile court judge convicted him of violating the state’s criminal threats statute, which requires prosecutors to show a threat was unequivocal, unconditional, immediate and specific.” He spent 100 days in juvenile hall.
In October 2002, a divided appeals court upheld the teen’s conviction. Justice Conrad Rushing dissented, warning that the poems were protected speech and similar in tone to poets such as Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg. The Supreme Court then agreed to hear the case.
At stake here is far more than George T’s well being. In fact, as a graduating senior at a different South Bay school he will be largely unaffected by the verdict of the case. The people who will be greatly affected are the current and future students in American schools. The California Supreme Court will essentially be setting a precedent on whether dark musings are permitted to students and whether it is a crime to express discontent through poetry.
Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Laurence, who is defending the conviction, declined to comment. But in a court brief, he disputed the argument that George’s threats were artistic expression. To the state, they were just brazen, dangerous — and real — threats.
It is irrelevant to the victim of a threat (and therefore the First Amendment) whether or not the threat has any literary, artistic or social value,” the state told the justices.
(Tip credit to Genie Rose)
UPDATE:
The poem at issue was titled “Faces.” It was written by George T. (also known as Julius), a student who was new to his school. Julius gave the poem to some of his female classmates to read. The poem read as follows:
Faces
Who are these faces around me?
Where did they come from?
They would probably become the
next doctors or loirs or something. All
really intelligent and ahead of their
game. I wish I had a choice on
what I want to be like they do.
All so happy and vagrant. Each
Original in their own way. They
Make me want to puke. For I am
Dark, Destructive & Dangerous. I
Slap on my face of happiness but
Inside I am evil!! For I can be
the next kid to bring guns to
kill students at school. So Parents
watch your children cuz I’m BACK!!
by: Julius AKA Angel.The page on which the poem appeared was labeled “Dark Poetry.” Julius testified that he used that label so that a reader would understand that his writings were fictional.
UPDATE:
Boy’s violent poetry isn’t criminal, court rules
The California supreme court has aquitted George T saying the dark poetry he wrote when he was 15 was not criminal.
“What is readily apparent is that much of the poem plainly does not constitute a threat,” Justice Carlos Moreno wrote for the seven-member court in a dispute that pitted free speech rights against the government’s responsibility to provide safe schools.
…
The justices noted the poem said the boy “can” be the next kid to bring guns to school — not that he would.
…
The boy, now 18, argued that he had no violent intentions and that he regarded poetry as an artistic means of describing emotions “instead of acting them out.” Prosecutors had contended the First Amendment does not protect criminal threats, even when they are tucked into a poem.Prosecutor Jeffrey Laurence noted that the boy circulated the poem 11 days after a student another California high school killed two classmates and wounded 13 others in a shooting rampage.
But defense attorney Michael Kresser told the justices that the boy’s prosecution was an overreaction.
(Tip credit to Bumper and mega)
I don’t suppose you have a copy of the poetry anywhere, do you?
I’d really like to see if it was a dark musing that is being blown out of proportion or something more sinister…
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
I’m disgruntled,
And Columbine will look like child’s play compared to what I’m planning to do!
That is not really poetry. It’s just a veiled threat. It is not even really veiled.
I can’t denounce in practice what is happening. I can denounce it in theory, but there is a limit (see above).
The post has been updated to include the deadly poem.
It’d be nice to hear from Julius himself. He’s 18 now, so I wish he’d go to the media and express his views on everything.
I wouldn’t expect any statement from Julius himself until the court case is concluded.
After reading the poem, I’ve gotta say that this Julius kid could use some more edumakashum. “Loirs”? “happy and vagrant”? His teachers have sorely failed him, methinks.
Aside from that, his poem seems like a quick rant from a kid trying to blow off some steam and frustration. He works it out through his poetry instead of stifling it until it erupts into physical violence. We’ve all been angst-ridden teens. This is harmless and the prosecutors should be ashamed.
I’m not usually too sympathetic to schools in Zero Tolerance situations, and frankly like to write also, so most times I support a student’s right to write whatever he wants.
However, I guess I can’t sympathize too much with this student. He chose to write what he wrote, and it did contain a threat (however non-specific), and threats are not free speech. Just because you use words doesn’t mean your words can’t be actionable (”stick ‘em up”, for example, simply because it’s a worded phrase, is not protected by the first amendment).
He wrote and published a pretty obviously allusive threat, and he got a consequence he didn’t like out of it. As we like to say, choices have consequences: you can choose the choice, but not the consequence.
The only issue I have is whether the writing actually fit the statute with which he is charged. If so, no first amendment issue: words can be used to commit a crime, and dressing them up as literature doesn’t change that.
The words definitely do not fit the statue:
…which requires prosecutors to show a threat was unequivocal, unconditional, immediate and specific.
Well, if it’s true that the words do not fit the statute, then he was innocent of any offense, and this shouldn’t be an issue here, right?
Question, Jim. Are you quoting the statute, the news article, or the case law (the judges’ writing on the subject)? That would help me evaluate your comment.
That was a quote from the article referencing the statute. Even though the statute doesn’t apply and he was innocent of criminal conduct there will still be an issue as schools are not restricted to acting solely based on legal definitions. The court will be ruling on the criminal verdict as well as the civil rights issue. It could come back that he is found not guilty of the crime but that he did not have the right to express himself in the manner that he did.
I love the state’s argument:
“It is irrelevant to the victim of a threat (and therefore the First Amendment) whether or not the threat has any literary, artistic or social value,” the state told the justices.”
Sure, it’s irrelevant to the victim of a threat… but it isn’t irrelevant to the definition of a threat. It is this ‘literary, artistic or social value’ that allows for it to not be considered a threat. It is the defining of the piece as ‘Dark Poetry’ clearly labeled at the top of the paper that qualifies it for the First Amendment! Pure idiocy by the attorneys for the state, but the real lunacy of this is that it is completely acceptable and even worthy of consideration as a valid argument in our post-9/11 and post-Columbine world.
“Those who would sacrifice Liberty for Security deserve neither!”
HEy Ed, if it’s not a specific threat, then there can’t be a victim, erego it cannot be a threat since there was no one to which it was directed at. One cannot threaten nobody. The word threaten has to have a target, an object to whom the subject is acting towards.
Listening to what people say
Here in the USA, it seems that whenever a student makes any statement that can be interpreted as violent, the…
I watched the arguments at the California Supreme court for this case… near the end of the hour one of the judges who had hardly questioned the attorneys during the hearing said, (and I’m summarizing from ny notes here…) “Are you claiming that someone could claim first ammendment protection while in the process of committing a crime? If a robber walks into a bank and hands a note to the teller that says:
Roses are Red
Violets are Blue
Give me the money
or I’ll shoot you
Would you say that that is protected speech?”
Her on-the spot poetry garnered laughter from the gallery.
The decision came out yesterday in favor of the defendant… that the court found the poetry too ambiguious to be considered a threat.
This is a scarey for me, as my daughter just got in trouble for writing the “kill” word toward another student. But she meant it only as a joke.
The school counciler called the police, and a report was taken. We still await a court date.
Jan-