Supreme Court Just Condoned the Arrest and Jailing of a Child — for Burping in Class

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Albuquerque, NM — Albuquerque, New Mexico is home to some of the world’s most dangerous cops. After a Supreme Court decision this week, we now know why they are able to continue in spite of their horrid track record. In typical police state fashion, the court decided the arrest and charges of a 13-year-old child — for burping in class — were fine and dandy.

In what sounds like a piece out of the Onion, Reuters reported that the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to revive a civil rights lawsuit against a New Mexico police officer for arresting a 13-year-old boy who burped repeatedly and disrupted his class.

The arresting officer, Arthur Acosta was granted qualified immunity and will be protected from any lawsuit.

According to Reuters, Justice Neil Gorsuch did not take part in considering whether to take up the case. Before joining the Supreme Court in April, Gorsuch was part of the three-judge federal appeals court panel in Colorado that previously ruled 2-1 in favor of Acosta. Gorsuch was the dissenter in that ruling, saying the boy should not have been arrested for intentionally belching.

The original incident happened in May of 2011 at Albuquerque’s Cleveland Middle School. After repeatedly burping in class, instead of simply disciplining the child, the school called the cops. The 13-year-old boy, who was in 7th grade at the time, was then searched, arrested, handcuffed, and brought to jail — for burping.

After being held in a juvenile detention center for over an hour, his mother was finally informed that her son had been arrested.

The boy’s mother filed a lawsuit rightfully arguing that her her son’s arrest was unlawful and resulted in excessive force. However, thanks to the insanity of the legal system, she has no recourse against the school officials or the cop who kidnapped her son for burping.

“At worst, [the boy] was being a class-clown and engaged in behavior that would have subjected generations of school boys to an after-school detention, writing lines, or a call to his parents,” a complaint filed by her attorneys said. However, instead of using these normal means of discipline, the school opted for the barrel of a gun.

After being arrested, the child was then suspended for the remainder of the school year.

Originally, the court also ruled on a separate complaint brought against the school for their decision to search the boy the following November, after the arrest.

According to court documents, the assistant principal suspected the child was involved in a marijuana deal and made the boy remove his shoes and jeans, and flip the waistband of his shorts outward. The search was fruitless and revealed that the principal’s suspicions were false.

According to the Guardian, the mother argued the school official engaged in an unlawful strip search of the boy. But the court found the use of the term “strip search” was a stretch and did not violate the boy’s constitutional rights.

According to Reuters, in her appeal to the Supreme Court, the teen’s mother said Acosta should have known that New Mexico law clearly establishes that arrests of school children must be reserved for violent offenses or when other students are at risk of harm.

Criminalizing “everyday acts of misbehavior” pushes kids out of school and teaches them that there is no limit to the power of the state to arrest them, the mother argued.

When a child is arrested for being the class clown and a court not only upholds the arrest but grants immunity to the ones who conducted it, something is seriously wrong.

Kidnapping and caging a child for burping shows that the mere act of being a child is now criminalized.

Instead of attempting to solve a problem with logic and reason, schools are now taking the easy road and turning to the barrel of a gun to force compliance. This is not only dangerous and lazy, but entirely unnecessary.

A study of more than 185,000 private and public school users from 2010 to 2014 revealed that violence is largely a problem in the public school sector. Private schools, unlike public schools, have an incentive to create a safe and caring environment for their students, so they take a far more proactive approach to prevent bullying — and it works.

Without using police force, private schools are able to reduce bullying and violence to levels far below that of public schools. Imagine that.

What this data illustrates is the societal dependence on the state to solve matters that should be handled without government. Being dependent upon the state to solve one’s problems is a de facto dependency upon violence.

“THE STATE REPRESENTS VIOLENCE IN A CONCENTRATED AND ORGANIZED FORM. THE INDIVIDUAL HAS A SOUL, BUT AS THE STATE IS A SOULLESS MACHINE, IT CAN NEVER BE WEANED FROM VIOLENCE TO WHICH IT OWES ITS VERY EXISTENCE.” -MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI

If you truly want a glimpse into the horrid effects of the police state on all school children, take a scroll through our archives, at this link.

Until people wake up to the reality of relying on a system of violence to maintain “order,” we can expect this problem to get worse.

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