My sister had a classmate who ended up with a felony conviction for counterfeiting money, using a low-end HP OfficeJet and glueing two sides together as a joke. It was absurd, to the point the sentencing judge made his displeasure known.
(Says the misfit who befriended their SRO[school resource officer])
My beef is the chickenshit school people who escalate things out of laziness or malice. Heck, the teacher’s doubts made it into the article.
The judge is free to dismiss the charge, if he thinks it's absurd. How did she end up with a conviction?
They can't willy-nilly decide not to sentence someone - they merely can hand out the minimum possible sentence (which may be no sentence at all) after finding the defendant guilty.
If the law is stupid and assholes are abusing it, there's little a judge can do[1] - unless they happen to be a constitutional court and can declare laws unconstitutional.
You'd need someone with the power to pardon or commute, which are powers generally only held by high ranking members of the executive.
[1] This depends on the country, but in some places judges are given greater freedom to interpret the 'intent' of the law as opposed to going by the letter. Sure, the kid technically made fake money, even if it was really shitty, but it clearly wasn't the intent of the law to criminalize what that kid did.
I did not say they didn't.
They may do so - may meaning they are allowed to - if it is obvious that there was no crime or there is insufficient evidence or there was a procedural error etc. (rules for this can vary greatly).
In this case that does not apply at all though.
Don't you think if the judge could just dismiss the charge they would have done so? Do you honestly believe you've got a better handle on the legalities of this than the person whose job this is?
The legalities are pretty clear; the judge is able to dismiss the case. I don't believe I know that more than the judge does; he also knew that he was legally able to dismiss the case.
Whether he exercises that power is a political question, not a legal question. But to this point:
> They may do so - may meaning they are allowed to - if it is obvious that there was no crime or there is insufficient evidence or there was a procedural error etc. (rules for this can vary greatly).
None of those is necessary. In the case I witnessed, the reasoning was quite obviously "the defendant is too young for this to make any sense", and the official statement was "the case is dismissed in the interest of justice".
In the US that is possible in only about 12-15 jurisdictions, depending on who's counting. Some explicitly spell out in which cases a judge may do so, others leave that power broadly undefined.
I wonder why, having seen that done once, you seem so insistent to extrapolate that judges everywhere and always must have that power.
http://volokh.com/2013/10/27/disciplinary-charges-filed-mess...
I think the police should deal with violence in school. Kids get assaulted at school in ways that would get the offender locked up if it happened in the street. School is somehow a law-free zone for a lot of offences.