In Maryland, a Soviet-Style Punishment For a Novelist 441
An anonymous reader writes A 23-year-old teacher at a Cambridge, Md. middle school has been placed on leave and—in the words of a local news report — "taken in for an emergency medical evaluation" for publishing, under a pseudonym, a novel about a school shooting. The novelist, Patrick McLaw, an eighth-grade language-arts teacher at the Mace's Lane Middle School, was placed on leave by the Dorchester County Board of Education, and is being investigated by the Dorchester County Sheriff's Office, according to news reports from Maryland's Eastern Shore. The novel, by the way, is set 900 years in the future."
Sue the bastards (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. Talk about a lawsuit that you are *guaranteed* to win.
This guy is going to make millions.
Re:Sue the bastards (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's hope so.
Re:Sue the bastards (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's hope so.
So we should hope that someone can collect millions in taxpayer dollars because they were placed on paid leave? TFA is a biased opinion piece presenting third and fourth hand information, and quotes with no context, in a clear attempt to generate outrage, and thus pageviews. I have no idea what the real story is, but maybe everyone should just calm down and wait for the facts to come out from a reputable source that doesn't use "Soviet-Style Punishment" in their headline. The Soviets didn't send their enemies home on paid leave.
Re:Sue the bastards (Score:5, Informative)
There is a less hysterical piece at NewsOne [newsone.com], also this from the Washington Times [washingtontimes.com]. There is also an opposing opinion in the Baltimore Sun [baltimoresun.com].
Does that help?
Re:Sue the bastards (Score:5, Informative)
Does that help?
Yes, that helps, since these sources contradict many of the "facts", and the main theme, of TFA:
- His book The Insurrectionist [amazon.com] was published more than three years ago.
- School authorities have been aware of the book since it was first published.
- His book had little or no influence on the decision to place him on administrative leave.
- The main reason for his suspension was a "bizarre" four page letter that he wrote to county officials, that raised mental health concerns.
- He has not been arrested, and is not being charged with any offence (TFA does not say he was, buy many commenters here have assumed this).
- It does not appear that his mental health evaluation was mandatory or coerced in anyway other than as a condition of returning to work.
So it appears that there were some legitimate concerns about his mental health, and that authorities' response to those concerns was measured and reasonable.
Re:Sue the bastards (Score:5, Insightful)
So what you're saying is that rather than a story of "Over-reaction by elected officials and law enforcement", we instead have a story about "piss-poor and irresponsible reporting by the mainstream media"?
I think the much more interesting story is "Why do presumably educated and internet savvy Slashdot readers repeatedly believe journalistic garbage that can be debunked with a 30 second Google search?".
Re:Sue the bastards (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know. It sounds like they kidnapped him in the night, forced him to leave hims hometown, and have imprisoned him somewhere against his will, just based on a fictional novel --- probably a jail or psych ward, where they are already administering drugs, so he won't have the mental faculties left to pursue any action, not that he could without ability to travel and speak to an attorney.
McLaw was suspended by the Dorchester County Board of Education pending an investigation and is no longer in the area. He is currently at a location known to law enforcement and does not currently have the ability to travel anywhere.
Re:Sue the bastards (Score:5, Funny)
Someone should write a dystopian sci-fi novel about this (oh wait/Yo Dawg...).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sue the bastards (Score:5, Interesting)
America.... home of the fr... yeah right.
Anyway, take a look at the kind of books that are *taught* in schools:
Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare
Macbeth by Shakespeare
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Julius Caesar by Shakespeare
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Hamlet by Shakespeare
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
So lets see... underage sex, murder of your relatives, regicide, racism, lynchings, rape, adultery, organised crime, a mentally-ill killer and of course - lawless schoolboys killing each other! What's not to love about the American school system, yeehaw!
Re:Sue the bastards (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sue the bastards (Score:4, Insightful)
But they do this by paying LARGE amounts of money.
If the union backs him, he will probably get his job.
If the union does not back him, he won't get his job, he will instead get a ton of money.
Re:Sue the bastards (Score:5, Funny)
"Think of the children"
The book is 900 years in the future. I think you mean "Think of the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren."
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Thirty generations about thirty years apart? I like your precision.
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The person's chances are not all that good. Unless the union backs them up (and even then it can be a stretch) schools are pretty hard to go up against. "Think of the children", while often mocked, is a pretty powerful rallying cry for local officials who might be worried about parental outrage or practicing 'cover your ass' security where it is better to come down hard and be seeing to be doing something then risk something happening and be blamed for not acting. The life of some middle school teacher does not even begin to factor in.
Nah... I don't live in Maryland, but in my state... in my highschool, one of our teachers that was in his mid 30's started "Dating" a freshman. She broke up with him, so he started sending her letters, stalking her, finally ended up crawling in her bedroom window one night and her dad caught him. They fired him, he was charged and convicted of statutory, but then a judge forced the school to hire him back, with back pay. As far as I know he's still teaching there. Totally ostracized and they gave him a "Sho
Re:Sue the bastards (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile one of our other teachers, a woman, was known to sleep with students and married one after he graduated, nothing was ever done to her. The difficulty of firing a teacher pretty much comes down to how much PR is involved and if the union feels it will be better served getting rid of the person vs keeping them, either due to internal or external political concerns.
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convicted of statutory and the school was forced to hire him back? i'm not believeing it until you link to a news article
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Re:Sue the bastards (Score:5, Insightful)
Think of the children is the battle cry of Tyrants everywhere. I won't vote for anyone, even if I agree 99% with them politically, if they make any statement similar to "do it for the children". I urge every slashdotter to do the same this election cycle, even if it means voting for the "other guy". AND let the Politicians know that hiding behind skirts and baby strollers is what terrorists do.
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That would mean not voting for the Repubmocrats at the very least, or more likely, abstaining altogether...
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Curious, I have seen on the ballot every single year everywhere I have ever lived there is always a measure to "support better education" by "allocating more funds". What I find so odd, is that despite these measures passing, and education getting more funds, next year there will be another measure that uses the same language.
If we keep making schools better by giving them more money, why aren't schools exponentially better by now?
UNION? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's exactly why we must destroy what's left of the unions. As usual they're the last thing standing in the way of a fascist state.
Re:Sue the bastards (Score:5, Interesting)
Not necessarily (Score:5, Informative)
Wow. Talk about a lawsuit that you are *guaranteed* to win.
This guy is going to make millions.
My best friend is an attorney and we've known each other for years. He has taught me a lot about how the law really works in the USA (I live in the US too by the way). Literally anything can happen in court. You may be right in that the odds may be good that he'll be able to sue and win, but it all depends on factors we can't control or predict. The judge the case gets is important. If it's a jury trial, the outcome may have more to do with the abilities of the lawyers involved than the actual merits of the case. Then if you don't like the verdict and appeal it, you go back to square one because some appellate judges tend to favor one side over the other. You get a really conservative appellate male judge in the Scalia mold and you could find that he'll basically allow the government to do anything if they feel that public safety was potentially at risk. Keep in mind too that the author may be greatly exaggerating what happened to him and what really happened may be a lot less sensational than the news report.
Re:Not necessarily (Score:5, Informative)
Keep in mind too that the author may be greatly exaggerating
Keep in mind that nobody's spoken to the author. Sheriff Phillips is the one telling everyone that he "is currently at a location known to law enforcement and does not currently have the ability to travel anywhere."
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You know I really hate the paranoid, tin foil hat, the sky is falling, libertarian nut cases that tend to post all the time on Slashdot....
But even I have to say "WHAT THE HECK?" to this story. Wow this is just over the top.
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Hopefully, but probably not. The author is black.
Reports are still too sketchy (Score:4, Insightful)
The reports (the Atlantic article is an opinion piece about the local reports regarding the incident) are too sketchy at this point to decide if there's a good probable cause for the teacher to be arrested (besides his having written a presumably controversial book, which is not a good reason for somebody in a presumably democratic country to get arrested).
What it does reveal is the attitude of the local reporters who appear to be somewhat supportive or at the very least neutral to the police action. I know, a news report is supposed to be objective. But I don't see any mention in the quoted parts of the news reports about the teacher's free speech rights. The "first ammendment" comment is in the Atlantic article not the news reports. Since these are local news reporters they probably also reflect local biases. Possible threats to safety are given more importance than any free speech rights.
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In Soviet Maryland (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In Soviet Maryland (Score:5, Interesting)
Stephen King is probably lucky he lives in a different area of the northeast.......otherwise, he'd be on trial for all sorts of sick demented things.
Seriously, though -- if the teacher had other suspicious behaviours, it would be one thing, but just writing a fictional story based on an area he's familiar with isn't enough to indicate criminal thought.
Re:In Soviet Maryland (Score:5, Informative)
they need to take to avoid future litigation for "not acting", that you can't necessarily blame the police
This isn't accurate. The police are under no requirements to act - they even won a Supreme Court case regarding the matter.
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The problem is that there are very few people with the guts to say "I will take the responsibility for ending this investigation right now because I believe there is no risk".
Once "the children" are invoked then anything can be justified to protect "the children".
And who is going to end his/her career by saying there is no risk when someone else might find something that was missed in the perpetrator's back
Re:In Soviet Maryland (Score:5, Insightful)
You are both right and wrong. The police yes....however the DA and Sheriff are often both elected positions, meaning that they do have certain "requirements" if they want to be re-elected, and often respecting civil rights is unpopular with the populace; and a LOT of people are willing to give them a pass for violating rights if they come up with even a flimsy excuse.
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that you can't necessarily blame the police or the school.
Sure I can. Screwing up people's lives is immoral, and they definitely can be blamed for taking actions which do exactly that, regardless of any societal pressure being put on them.
Re:In Soviet Maryland (Score:5, Insightful)
The police don't need to act on every tip reported in. If that were the case, they would need to respond to every 911 call that reported that the McDonald's teller gave them a medium fries and not a large like they ordered. You know, because it might possibly become a violent situation and if they don't act they might be to blame.
Even if they did "act" on this tip, all it would warrant might be a visit to the guy's house to talk with him briefly and run some background checks on him. That would have shown that he's a fiction writer and not publishing some manifesto about how he's going to go berserk and kill everyone. Then the author and the police would go their own ways with as little fuss as possible. Forcibly taking him in for "an emergency medical evaluation", not letting anyone know where he is, and releasing statements phrasing everything he did as if he was an imminent threat isn't "acting", it's overreacting. Overreacting never takes down valid threats - at least, not without also taking down a lot of non-threats as well. If they actually, properly "acted", we wouldn't be reading about this because it would have been a routine interview and closing of the report.
Re:In Soviet Maryland (Score:5, Informative)
Except this is Maryland.
The police there think that being close to the capital has granted them more authority, and the people are wacko, self-entitled over-reactors to start with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
... During the period from 1962 until 1967, Cambridge was a center of Civil Rights Movement protests as blacks sought access to work and housing. They also wanted to end racial segregation of schools and other public facilities. Race-related violence erupted in Cambridge in 1963 and 1967, and forces of the Maryland National Guard were assigned to the city to assist local authorities with peace-keeping efforts.[13] The leader of the radical movement was H. Rap Brown, the Minister of Justice of The Black Panther Party,[14] and local organizer Gloria Richardson.[15] These individuals incited the local community to burn the 2nd Ward area of Cambridge, Maryland which housed most of the African American community. The local population's homes, most of which were destroyed, were rebuilt under a 1969 Public Housing Act by the then Governor, Spiro Agnew and the Federal Government. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, public segregation in Cambridge officially ended. ...
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Forcibly taking him in for "an emergency medical evaluation", not letting anyone know where he is, and releasing statements phrasing everything he did as if he was an imminent threat isn't "acting", it's overreacting.
Overreacting seems to be the default mode of police in many parts of the country these days.
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Re:In Soviet Maryland (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes I certainly can; people who uphold bad laws are almost as bad as those who enact them.
And more importantly, unless there was evidence that this teacher was posing an immediate threat to children, they had no authority to arrest / detain him, regardless of any potential future litigation.
To put it simply, based on the current description of the situation, it appears the police did something both illegal and immoral and the school board did something immoral and possibly illegal.
Note: Every news story I find on this is pretty vague on the details. I suspect there is more going on here than initially reported. The news agencies have quite possibly left out important and pertinent information as it makes a great click-bait story.
Re:In Soviet Maryland (Score:4, Insightful)
You CANNOT stop crime. And arresting people for "Pre Crime" is right out of Sci-Fi (Minority Report).
A free society is messy. And often terribly so. We MUST accept being messy, sometimes nasty and ugly, if we are to truly appreciate the beautiful. Anything less is ugly, without any beauty to appreciate.
What an idiot! (Score:2, Funny)
He should have made the plot around child molesting instead of shooting! Geeze!
Prequel (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Prequel (Score:4, Insightful)
Are school shootings really a social issue? I don't think it has either a hashtag nor a dedicated jezebel columnist, so how can we be sure?
EFF Should help (Score:3)
I know its a bit of a stretch of the mission, but based on what is known as of now, I think the EFF (and maybe even the ACLU) should come to this guys aid. Is this sort of thing exactly why we establish these sorts of organizations - to protect free speech be it online or on paper?
Slow on the take (Score:5, Insightful)
As if the story itself could not be more horrible I can't believe the books were published in 2011 and 2013 and just now they decide to go after him. Either he pissed off someone high up and they just found a reason to go after the guy or some bored cop just got around to discovering fiction...
Unbelievable!
Re: (Score:3)
Well, there is a word [liberty.me] that defines accurately what is happening here, but because this word has been slowly stripped of its rich meaning and turned into an empty slur, most people have stopped using it appropriately, instead merely employing it as a slur. For shame, really, because its attached historical lessons are desperately needed these days.
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Don't worry, we're about to get re-educated on the matter. And this time there isn't any "free world" left to come to the rescue, just Stalin - er, Putin.
Re:Slow on the take (Score:4, Insightful)
"Fascism" was a political system practiced in several Mediterranean European countries in the early part of the 20th century. It usually entailed economic and cultural coordination by the state, a personality cult around a leader, a single-party or sham democratic system, national idealism, and militant, expansionist foreign policy. It's applicability outside of this narrow context is hotly contested, you can start fights among historians by asking "Was Falangist Spain Fascist?" or "Was Nazi Germany Fascist?"
Committing a guy for writing a book is many things, but it ain't fascism. It's people like you who apply it scattershot to every instance of emotive negativity toward the state that have stripped the word of its "rich meaning." You should know who said this:
Guilty (Score:2)
I read the opening paragraph of his book on Amazon. The man *is* guilty of a crime. Assault and battery on the world of literature!
Really, his stuff is "dark and stormy night" bad. Toss him in jail. No, wait, that's not a severe enough punishment for what he's done. Something more extreme is required. I know, make him teach middle school!
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Wait. Snoopy wrote that line hundreds of times.
You're not putting down Snoopy, are you?
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Snoopy was smart enough to not publish his novels. Besides he never or out of the first paragraph.
Set In The Past (Score:5, Interesting)
Instead of 900 years in the future, he should have set it in the past. Or at least included dinosaurs. You'd never get in trouble for writing about Dinosaurs... Oops, sorry. Forget about that. [ibtimes.com]
In all seriousness, though, school shootings are a problem. However, I'm much more afraid of my oldest son (who begins middle school in a couple of days) getting in trouble for someone mistaking something he says/does as being a threat against the school than I am afraid that someone will walk into the building and kill a bunch of people. (My oldest is diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome and anxiety disorder. He can tend to be clueless about "other meanings" to the things he says or how people might take offense to certain phrases that he means in an innocent manner. Not a good combination with overzealous administrators who are jumping at the slightest whiff of trouble.)
Set In The Past (Score:2)
The problem is that apparently some officials believe that school shootings would somehow become less of a problem if nobody is allowed to talk or write about them...
More to the story? (Score:3, Interesting)
All of the stories I have read about this use the same reference: WBOC. There is, as of yet, no other source. I think there is more to this story than has been reported so far. I am not suggesting the lack of facts is a coverup, just that it is still in the early stages of falling into place.
Re:More to the story? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, there's also the school board's press release: http://www.dcps.k12.md.us/file... [k12.md.us]
Well Obviously... (Score:5, Funny)
Also, ever since Heuristic Neural Patterning became economically viable in the mid 24th century, 'school' exists as little more than a footnote in some of the low level neural patterning modules. I'm not sure why you'd expect to find enough people for a mass casualty incident visiting one.
change.org petition (Score:3)
There is a petition at Change.org requiring the county school superintendent to apologize.
https://www.change.org/p/dr-he... [change.org]
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Has *anything* ever changed from having a bunch of people sign a change.org petition?
Re:change.org petition (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, there was the Declaration of Independence, but those people followed up the petition with gunfire.
"rest of the story" (Score:2)
Has anyone heard anything that might even slightly justify this.. ahm... I am not sure it is even an 'arrest'... hrm... event?
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According to people who claim to 'know more', he was using aliases for real life things like when he applied for the job, not just pseudonyms for writing. People claiming to be parents have also chimed in saying there was 'real fear' around this person, but I would not be surprised if this fear came after the board discovered his books as opposed to before.
There are also claims he sent a 'disturbing letter' to the school board, but 'it was not their place to update with facts', so I am skeptical
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(adding)
According to people who claim to 'know more', he was using aliases for real life things like when he applied for the job, not just pseudonyms for writing. People claiming to be parents have also chimed in saying there was 'real fear' around this person, but I would not be surprised if this fear came after the board discovered his books as opposed to before.
There are also claims he sent a 'disturbing letter' to the school board, but 'it was not their place to update with facts', so I am skeptical of the poster.
yea, the only way this could really end up making any sense was that some old lady librarian at the school found his books, got concerned and went to the school-board/police... who had to talk to him for due diligence, and when they did talk to him, they found out completely by accident that the dude was actually nuts. Maybe he threatened suicide or took a swing at a cop? Getting someone committed is NOT easy, I've tried doing it before, it's nearly impossible.
If they really committed him for writing 2 book
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In the threads on the local site I see a lot of parents chiming in that they are glad this happened, that it is better to be safe then sorry, or even going as far as to say that anyone who would own (much less write) such books is n
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Voltaire (Score:5, Insightful)
It's awesome that his pen name was Voltaer [amazon.com] which sounds like a reference to Voltaire [wikipedia.org] who was fighting for civil rights and had his books burned.
It sounds like this guy is brilliant. He was smart enough to use a pen name to hide his writings from his students, and also smart enough to choose a pen name that mocks anyone who uses these writings to defame him. Clearly, Voltaire should now be required reading by Dorchester county students.
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I was beginning to think I was the only one who caught this. Put this in your pack for the next time you need to explain irony and coincidence with someone.
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So help me figure out what the K. S. means.
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It was panglossian for him to think this would all turn out for the best.
Has anyone actually READ the book? (Score:2, Insightful)
I've only read the Amazon precis, but it *seems* like the shooting is a plot device against which the author has characters act and react. Not all that different than Nevil Shute using a nuclear war as the backdrop for "On The Beach."
I am, frankly, of two minds about this. On one hand, possibly support a glory seaking attention hound. On the other, be tracked and branded as someone who "supports violence in schools" by buying the e-book. On the gripping hand, just read the thing myself and make up my ow
Every country has freedom of expression (Score:2)
There's always a possibility of mental illness. (Score:2, Interesting)
Hang on. Everyone is jumping to the conclusion that a perfectly normal teacher just happened to be grabbed and taken for an "emergency medical evaluation" because he had innocently written a book. It is also quite possible that he is actually suffering from mental illness -- schizophrenia often manifests itself in early adulthood, for example -- and that his books were originally written as a coping mechanism for the early stages of illness. Remember, approximately 1% of the population will suffer from schi
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Sorry, not buying that without any evidence to suggest it.
I think the most likely explanation is that overly paranoid police have detained someone for a trumped up "emergency medical evaluation" because he wrote a book on a controversial topic, and because law enforcement can't accept that you could write a piece of fiction and not hav
Do Everything Wrong Day (Score:4, Insightful)
The slogan for the day? "If everyone is in trouble, nobody is."
.
Stephen King and Rage (Score:4, Interesting)
Stephen King did something very similar to this years and years ago, under virtually the same circumstances. He wrote a book called "Rage", under a pseudonym, which was about a fictional school shooting in a setting that would've amounted to the present when the book was written. Of course, the shooter in Rage was also portrayed sympathetically (he goes insane because all of his classmates are assholes). There were even cases where the shooters in actual school shootings were carrying around copies of Rage, which made him (voluntarily) pull the book from publication.
Yet strangely, I don't recall anything about Stephen King being arrested in the middle of the night and involuntarily committed to a mental hospital.
Re:Stephen King and Rage (Score:4, Funny)
Yet strangely, I don't recall anything about Stephen King being arrested in the middle of the night and involuntarily committed to a mental hospital.
Yeah, just who do you think is going to voluntarily go to Steven King's house in the middle of the night?
There might be more to this story (Score:4, Insightful)
It would be useful to know if McLaw is under investigation for behavior other than writing two novels
Yes, it would be very useful to know that before people go writing articles about how this guy has been locked up (if that) for (and only for, seems to be the implication) writing two novels. Oop, too late.
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Yes, that seems fair. If you are in court for child sexual crimes telling the judge you stuck your penis up some girl's ass, and they put you in prison ... you should probably blame yourself for not mentioning that it was a couple weeks ago, in July, a month after she turned 18, instead of back in January when she was 17. It's an important detail.
If the police are telling us they locked some guy up for writing novels... well, all the shit that comes their way is their fault. If something else is actual
FDR said it eighty years ago (Score:2)
"the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"
Habeas corpus (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, where is he now?
How is it possible for a person to simply disappear and have their whereabouts listed as "known to law enforcement".
IANAL, but it seems to me that someone with standing should file a writ of Habeas corpus because people should not just disappear like this in a first world country.
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WE ALL HAVE STANDING! I am living in this state, what the fuck? If the police come to disappear me for writing a book or reading some novel they don't like or whatever, I will send bodies back. You can imagine the shitstorm this will start and how it will affect my quality-of-life.
Do you know how many courts have ruled it self-defense to react to the police with lethal force if they try to arrest you wrongfully? In America we have dozens of these cases at state and federal levels, establishing clearly
First press reports not very good. (Score:3)
The problem here is that the press reports are just rehashes of what the cops are putting out. Somebody should find this guy and interview him. He may be in hiding for reasons of his own.
His book is self-published on Amazon [amazon.com]. It's been out since 2011, and you can read a sample there. This guy is not the next Steven King. A typical sentence: "As Zea approaches her partner she cannot restrain herself from hyperventilating as she peers at the black embossed letters on the translucent glass sign above the entrance to the central atrium".
Today, the Los Angeles Times quotes cops [latimes.com] as saying "Everybody knew about the book in 2012", and that this is more about a four-page letter he recently sent to officials in Dorchester County, containing "complaints of alleged harassment and an alleged possible crime". There may be more clarity over the next few days, now that the story is getting attention.
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We still don't, actually. He's neither rich nor white.
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hey I saw movies and news from that time period and I'm calling BS. There was nobody but white people in the USA at that time
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It is a mistake to think of this from a viewpoint on Unions/No Unions. The school has no power to have this man arrested. The school has no power to have him "medically evaluated". They have no power to prevent him from traveling and in fact cannot ban him from the campus without a court order.
The State of Maryland is the most egregious offender here. THEY are the ones who have violated this man's rights. THEY are the ones who can apparently do this to anyone under the guise of security. The School is merel
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Looking at the teacher's age, they would not have tenure yet, so they will probably get no help from the union. Pre-tenure teachers are sacrificial, they can be fired at any time for any reason without recourse most of the time.
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He won't be getting his job back. He might get a lot of cash.
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Yeah, I think we're missing a big chunk of the story. He constitutionally can't be held against his will unless he's being charged with a crime past a certain point (24 hours I think?) Of course the cops know this, and if this went down exactly as reported the cops would also know they'd be setting themselves up for a HUGE lawsuit.
If it DID go down like the reports we have, I hope this guy sues the fuck out of the cops and the school and wins. But something makes me think we might not know the whole stor
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There is this thing called Involuntary Commitment, laws vary state by state. In Maryland they can hold you for up to 10 days as long as doctors sign off that you have a diagnosis. In the old days they could hold you indefinitely, a la One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest.
Re:Clap clap (Score:4, Interesting)
Check off one more box on the list of Police State attributes we are now experiencing.
Re:Don't Compare One Guy Getting Fired... (Score:5, Interesting)
They aren't comparing his getting fired to Soviet-style punishment. The comparison is to the forcing him, against his will, to "an emergency medical evaluation" in a location that only the police know of and won't release any details about. Making a guy disappear because he's suspected of bad behavior isn't something that's supposed to happen in the US. (That last statement might sound a bit naive. Take it as a goal for how our country should operate instead of the totalitarian method of just letting the authorities do whatever they want for whatever reason.)
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Maybe they were going to do just that to him but what with his being dead and all it's kind of hard
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I want to read that novel.
Check out the Amazon extract ('But amid all the despair and hopelessness, people were working indefatigably to stabilise the nation and alleviate the prevalent tumult; and on 28 August 2298, the sedulousness of these committed inidividual was recompensed.') and you might change your mind. Still, if the original article is accurate there's no justification for his treatment, and the implications are deeply disturbing. Have we been told the full story?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
But amid all the despair and hopelessness, people were working indefatigably to stabilise the nation and alleviate the prevalent tumult; and on 28 August 2298, the sedulousness of these committed inidividual was recompensed.
Zow. This guy was supposed to be a "language-arts" teacher. I think we can clear the Sherifs department of any charges of overreacting, Patrick McLaw is obviously a danger to himself and society.
Re: (Score:3)
But amid all the despair and hopelessness, people were working indefatigably to stabilise the nation and alleviate the prevalent tumult; and on 28 August 2298, the sedulousness of these committed inidividual was recompensed.
Zow. This guy was supposed to be a "language-arts" teacher. I think we can clear the Sherifs department of any charges of overreacting, Patrick McLaw is obviously a danger to himself and society.
"It was a dark and stormy night...."
Re: (Score:2)
this was in 1999 after 4/20/1999
I got an A
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They're looking for crazies that go on shooting sprees. What they should be doing is checking EVERYONE... not just people that publish books about school shootings while working at schools.
I frankly don't have a problem with them investigating the guy so long as they do it respectfully. That said, everyone should be checked out. These mass shootings are just crazy people acting out. Nothing more.
OR, and I know this is a long shot, but they could consider accepting that a free nation is an inherently dangerous one, and either accept that individuals have a right to live their lives without constantly being spied upon by a crazy government so paranoid it makes tweekers seem like reasonable people, or find some other, "safer" country to move to.
I know - leaving other people to their business so long as it's not directly and immediately affecting you - crazy idea, right?
Re: (Score:3)
We still don't have any facts, other than public officials covering their posteriors. We "know" he wrote a letter someone didn't like. Only that. You go to psych lockup for writing one letter these days?
"McLaw's letter was of primary concern to healthcare officials, Maciarello says. It, combined with complaints of alleged harassment and an alleged possible crime from various jurisdictions led to his suspension. Maciarello cautions that these allegations are still being investigated; authorities, he says, "p