Kids Used to Be Able to Be Kids, Now They May Be Sex Offenders

Radley Balko notes another example of blundering idiocy in the schools in a post titled Childhood Now a Sex Crime. From the story linked by Radley.

The two boys tore down the hall of Patton Middle School after lunch, swatting the bottoms of girls as they ran—what some kids later said was a common form of greeting.

But bottom-slapping is against policy in McMinnville Public Schools. So a teacher’s aide sent the gawky seventh-graders to the office, where the vice principal and a police officer stationed at the school soon interrogated them.

After hours of interviews with students the day of the February incident, the officer read the boys their Miranda rights and hauled them off in handcuffs to juvenile jail, where they spent the next five days.

Now, Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison, both 13, face the prospect of 10 years in juvenile detention and a lifetime on the sex offender registry in a case that poses a fundamental question: When is horseplay a crime?

Bradley Berry, the McMinnville district attorney, said his office “aggressively” pursues sex crimes that involve children. “These cases are devastating to children,” he said. “They are life-altering cases."

Radley states,

Honestly, the prosecutors who keep bringing ridiculous charges like these need to be disciplined.

Disciplined?!  Prosecutors, such as Radley references above, need to be driven from their offices, never to practice law again.  The teacher’s aide, the school’s vice principal, and the cop who interrogated the kids should also be driven from their respective positions.

Unruly schoolboys or sex offenders?

Posted by on 07/23 at 11:17 AM

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