"Not-pot leaf gets 6th-grader in big trouble"

[Anakin McFly]

"An 11-year-old boy at Bedford Middle School was suspended for 364 days after being caught with a substance that tested negative for marijuana."

http://www.roanoke.com/news/columns_and ... 91aa3.html

I have yet to fully understand the state of drug laws in America. On one hand, apparently almost everybody regardless of state smokes pot and gets away with it. On the other hand, there are laws like this suggesting it's highly criminalised in some states. wtf? Here there's the death penalty and no recreational drugs to be found outside really dodgy illegal areas, at least until some clueless foreigner comes by and ends up hanged upon discovery.

[Monk]

What planet are we on? Jesus Christ.

[Islandmur]

You need proof to arrest someone and put them in jail, but kids ? naww no proof needed to suspend them for 1 year.

[Gendo]

Maybe I'm misreading something, but it sounds to me like the suspension was lifted after they determined that it wasn't pot. Also, it says that the student was "bragging about having marijuana". While walking around with something that looked like pot. I don't see how it's unreasonable for the school to have gone ahead with the assumption that it actually was pot. Maybe it's just that the article isn't very clear, but I'm not seeing anything about the kid trying to explain that it was just a joke, or that it wasn't really pot.

Anyway, I'm not saying that a 364 day suspension is a fair response, but it sounds like the heading that's quoted in the OP is quite misleading. The kid was suspended because, based on available evidence at the time, he did have pot.

[Blade Azaezel]

Gendo, did you actually read the article cos it sounds like a whole bunch of grown ass adults dragged this out for months before realising their mistakes. Taking an 11 yr old to juvenile court over a leaf that failed testing 3 times is pretty damn extreme too.

[Gendo]

Like I said I had trouble following the article. I couldn't find anything about how the kid responded initially... did he try to tell them that it wasn't really pot? Or was he claiming that it was pot? It doesn't say either way. I'm not clear on what the "mistake" was here... you mean thinking he had pot when he didn't? Again, if the kid was claiming it was pot, that's not the adult's mistake. And even if it wasn't, the punishment was based on the rule that "pretend drugs" are treated the same as real drugs. Now I due think that's a bad rule, but whether the kid had real pot or not doesn't seem to have factored into the punishment. So this wasn't a case of him being punished for something that he didn't do, as the headline claims.

[Anakin McFly]

I couldn't find anything about how the kid responded initially... did he try to tell them that it wasn't really pot? Or was he claiming that it was pot?

Those were based on what other kids claimed, but which the kid in question denied. They also raise the possibility that the leaf was planted in his bag by school bullies, because the kid repeatedly said he had never seen it before and didn't know how it had gotten into his bag.

[Gendo]

I couldn't find anything about how the kid responded initially... did he try to tell them that it wasn't really pot? Or was he claiming that it was pot?

Those were based on what other kids claimed, but which the kid in question denied. They also raise the possibility that the leaf was planted in his bag by school bullies, because the kid repeatedly said he had never seen it before and didn't know how it had gotten into his bag.

If that's the case, then it really should have been more clear in the article. At the very least, it's certainly not in the first few paragraphs, which summarize what this whole case is about. The relevant bits really seem to be here:

Some schoolchildren claim another student bragged about having marijuana. They inform school administrators. An assistant principal finds a leaf and a lighter in the boy's knapsack. The student is suspended for a year. A sheriff's deputy files marijuana possession charges in juvenile court.
All of the above and more happened last September to the 11-year-old son of Bedford County residents Bruce and Linda Bays. He was a sixth-grader in the gifted-and-talented program at Bedford Middle School.
There was only one problem: Months after the fact, the couple learned the substance wasn't marijuana. A prosecutor dropped the juvenile court charge because the leaf had field-tested negative three times.

"There was only one problem". Um, if the kid was denying that any of this was true, then there was way more than one problem. And it should have been mentioned somewhere in there. After those paragraphs, the article goes on to a whole bunch of meticulous detail about the process of informing the parents, the court case, the findings, etc. Maybe buried somewhere within that is an explanation that the kid denied any of this, but man was it presented poorly.

Anyway, if the kid did deny it in the first place, then my response would indeed be completely different.

[Anakin McFly]

Yeah; it's not a very organised article. Found the paragraph:

"The assistant principal also told the couple that their son had told Wilson a high-schooler on the bus had given him the leaf. (The couple said their son has told them repeatedly he has no idea how the leaf got in his backpack, that he didn't know it was there, and that he never showed it off to anyone.)"

So it looks like conflicting accounts there.

[BruceSmith78]

Not that I agree with the punishment, but I bet that kid's full of shit. He was probably trying to be cool, got in deep shit, and then denied everything, cuz that's what kids do. It all sounds too elaborate to be some scheme a schoolyard bully hatched.

[Ptolemy_Banana]

The fact that this newspaper has piced up the story at the point where the parents of the child are suing the school board for the 'havoc wreaked upon the boy's psyche' makes me immediately suspicious. Unfortunately, the whole article is so poorly put together that I can't imagine there's any real investigative journalism going on here.

[Gendo]

Well at least it's not just me then.

[Ptolemy_Banana]

I'm here for you, dude.