Teen Jailed For Facebook Comment Reportedly Beat Up Behind Bars

I dislike that in the article they removed the context of his statement. Just reading this, it sounds like he was making a threat, but if you read the KHOU.com (Houston) article it appears that here's merely mocking the person who is calling him insane.

http://www.khou.com/news/texas-news/Texas-teen-charged-with-...

NPR version: "I think Ima shoot up a kindergarten / And watch the blood of the innocent rain down/ And eat the beating heart of one of them."

KHOU version: 'Oh you're insane, you're crazy, you're messed up in the head,’ to which he replied 'Oh yeah, I'm real messed up in the head, I'm going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts,’ and the next two lines were lol and jk.,"

"We have to...protect the general public and specifically, in this case, with it involving school children, we have to act."

This is disgusting. If someone says what he did it means one of two things:

1. He really meant it, and is about to go out and eat children.

2. He was being creative in a public medium.

It should be immediately obvious that in this case, we are dealing with situation #2 and the boy should be released. I am of the opinion that the burden of proof means that police should not be allowed to arrest someone even in the case of #1 unless there is more than just a public statement. It beggars belief that after discovering the facts in this case that the police still have him in custody.

This law must be found unconstitutional as soon as possible.

In middle school, I was assigned to write a parody. What I wrote was a parody of the Night before Christmas, in which a male student brought weapons to school and shot among other people the principle. This was pre-Columbine, mind you.

I was called into the Principle's office; he explained that he didn't take it personally, because he knows what parody is, but that they wanted to make sure everything was okay at home and that the other students weren't bullying me.

I got an A.

I wonder what today's world would think of "A Modest Proposal" or even "Lolita?" Works that are now considered good literature would, were they published today, see their authors vilified, (possibly) tortured, and jailed by an extremely paranoid public in a manner befitting the height of Soviet Russia (i.e. "Report your neighbour, comrade!").

This is a shame. The incentives for law enforcement are completely misaligned. Of course they will always want to be seen as "doing something" and never want to take the chance that someone's threats, real or fake, ever get carried out. But we are so hysterical about some form of terror maybe happening that we completely ignore the state terror that is happening. This isn't worth the imprisonment of our citizens for thoughtcrime!

By the way, at least in California, $500,000 is the recommended bail for... perjury? Threat of violence? Assault of a police officer? No: that's the recommended bail for an attempted assassination of a public official using a machine gun.

Presumably, the bond is this large because someone behind the case was afraid the kid might attack the school. On the one hand, this is understandable (though not excusable) because of previous events in that area. On the other, this is what leads to thought police and such behavior from courts needs to be destroyed at the core.

Wow ironic sarcasm is punishable with 10 years in prison I didn't know that. I can tell even without seeing the context.

BTW doesn't this violate freedom of speech? The kid didn't commit any crime he said some stupid things on Facebook as far as I know that shouldn't be a punishable offense.

Or are we becoming like the Minority Report without the time travel?

"Terroristic" -- this whole concept is straight out of 1984. How is it useful, legally?

What qualifies as "terroristic" and what doesn't? Does threatening to organize an online sit-in count? If not, why?

I'm already censoring myself. Congratulations America.

The bail is over the top. I don't know enough about what it takes for a charge to be a felony or not. I do know that a lot of things straddle the line between felony and not felony and then certain other factors can tip it one way or the other. Not sure if this is the case here. I'm guessing the word "terroristic" gets people all worked up since what he did is no where near what we think of today as a "terrorist". But when you take that word back to its root (and forget all the current political and emotional baggage it has today) it is fitting. And as has been discussed before, the amount of jail time cited in an article usually depends on the bias the article has. Stories like this love to toss around the absolute max sentence that this level of crime could bring. It makes the actions of legal system appear all the more ridiculous. ("Wah? 10 years for a stupid Facebook post?") But stories the other way (about some bad person getting off easy) like to throw around the absolute minimum sentence. This also makes the legal system appear all the more ridiculous. ("Wah? He could be out in as little as some short time for murder?") Even better is when they pair the two together and say that some relatively minor offence has a max sentence of X, while some other horrific offence can carry a sentence as little as Y (where X > Y).

I do love how we citizens love to second guess the actions (or inactions) of law enforcement without ever actually being in their position of making the decisions they have to make. Was this kid really going to do those things? Probably not but we can't really say for sure ("clearly there was no threat" is just an opinion). But if the police did nothing and then later he did it (or even something equally sinister) we would have been all over them for not seeing the warning signs or seeing and dismissing them.

> "The whole situation is kind of unfortunate," said New Braunfels Police Lt. John Wells. "We definitely understand the situation that Mr. Carter is in, however he made the comments, and it is an offense. We have to ... protect the general public and specifically, in this case, with it involving schoolchildren, we have to act. We take those very seriously."

It's very tempting to start screen-shotting and reporting Xbox live (and all the rest) comments.

The police have said that they take it very seriously, and that they have to act. Perhaps law enforcement is not aware just how toxic some parts of the online community is, and how many people they'd be locking up.

The sad thing is, a video game scenario of shooting up a school is probably perfectly legal.

A whole wall of posts about the law, the prosecutors, the bail -- not one about this seemingly ordinary teenage kid stripped naked, held in solitary, black-eyed and beaten to concussions in pre-trial confinement.

The law is what the police, the prosecutors and the general public can get away with, and this prosecution is what we get when there is no skepticism or accountability at all for those who carry out "the law."

But why is it that we never seem to care much about what happens to people in jails? Is it just a given now, something so commonplace that we just can't get worked up about it anymore?

If we can't have accountability for police and DA's can we at least have some accountability for the variously careless, incompetent and/or sadistic Mayberry's who run our prisons?

This is horrible, I really don't understand why such little reason has been applied to this case.

In a normal world, authorities would look at whether he has a motive to commit a crime, means to do it such as having illicit firearms, and plans to do it such as written statements.

In the fucked-up US of A, a sarcastic Facebook comment is enought to terrorize people enough to send him to jail.

A similar thing happened recently in the UK where a comedian was convicted for telling a joke.

10 O'Clock Live's take on it: http://youtu.be/d0aP-dGbjzw?t=18m43s

(Aaaand sometimes I hear people saying the Italian's Juridical System sucks. Just saying)

Wow.. This so smells like North Korea. A bad joke here and there or getting too tempered after bad game and the police throw you into jail. Of course I hope that he really was just joking - I've even heard of video game rage that has done some real harm and never I have heard that anyone was jailed.