The Difficulty of supreme court decisions (in two news stories)
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in favor student Lindsey Freespeech against local Acropolis High School. Freespeech, 15, received a majority vote of 6-3 in her favor. Acropolis High School attempted to censor an interview Freespeech had with the school newspaper. Freespeech filed suit in response.
Lindsey Freespeech was interviewed for a newspaper story in which she talked about the role her Christian faith had played in the past school year. The article quotes Freespeech as saying “The Lord has brought me to where I am today and for this I am ever grateful. May God bless this school.” The newspaper is distributed monthly around the Acropolis community.
Freespeech filed suit after the article was censored by the school district because they did not want the school to be portrayed as religiously biased. School administrator Michaelangelo Jones told the justice that “the school was simply acting in the best interest of the community. Acropolis High School has the right to be portrayed as they want in the community and should have the right to censor school-sponsored media as it sees fit.”
However, the student won the suit by pleading her First Amendment free-speech rights. The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech…” Freespeech felt that her rights were being violated when the newspaper was not allowed to publish her interview.
Three of six justices who voted in Freespeech’s favor cited the Tinker case from 1969. The justices of the time ruled that any speech in schools is free unless it directly prohibits learning. Justice Thomas Michaels said: “Learning was in no form prohibited by the publication of the school newspaper article. For this reason, the student press had a legal right to share the article containing religious language.”
Another judge, Justice Robert Thomas, cited Island Trees School District vs. Pico in his statement: “Court law limits the power of school boards to prohibit certain library books from being read,” he said. “It logically follows that a school’s power to censor the free press should likewise be limited. The student’s First Amendment rights were being violated when the school prevented her interview from being published.”
- Tony Williams
Sources:
http://www.splc.org/wordpress/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinker_v._Des_Moines_Independent_Community_School_District
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_Trees_School_District_v._Pico
A verdict was handed down by the Supreme Court today in the case Freespeech v. Acropolis High School. In a surprise move by the high school’s defense was defeated 6-3, the plaintiff, Lindsey Freespeech, won the case. For months the nation has watched with baited breath about what case law would be set. Lindsey Freespeech was interviewed for her school paper, “The Acropolis Bible Thumper,” in which she was quoted as saying “The Lord has brought me to where I am today and for this I am ever grateful. May God bless this school.” Many students approached the school administration to vocalize their discomfort with the language used. Subsequently the school asked for that issue to be discontinued and for the students, as school administrator, Michelangelo Jones, says “All students please try to use more all-encompassing language in interviews, we are a non-denominational public school and we should not let our religious views make our peers uncomfortable.”
Many experts expected the verdict to come in favor of the school. Despite objections that her first amendment rights were being infringed upon, Freespeech failed to recognize that the outlet for which she provided her sermon was under the heading of a public school and therefore not, in most people’s opinions, a proper place for her to express her religious views. Many people considered the case law to be established from such cases as Engel v. Vitale, Sante Fe School District v. Doe, or Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier.
Engel v. Vitale set the standard for the separation of church and state in school. In 1962 it was ruled unconstitutional for a school to play a prayer each morning. Despite the non-denominational aspect of the prayer it was still deemed unconstitutional as the word “God” was used throughout.
In Sante Fe School District v. Doe a school owned P.A. system was used to play a non-denominational prayer before the school’s football games led by a student. It was an optional prayer outside regular school hours. However when brought to the Supreme Court it was deemed an unconstitutional violation of first amendment rights, because the P.A. system was school property.
Doubtlessly the most talked about case law during the trial was that of the Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier. The principal of a high school censored aspects of a student led newspaper which he felt were inappropriate. Students contested that this violated their first amendment rights. in 1988 it was decided by the Supreme Court that non-private student newspapers are subject to a lower level of First Amendment protection.
Despite these previous rulings Freespeech still triumphed in her case. Experts are still attempting to decipher the new case law. In its current contradictory state it seems that high-school run student publications can be censored by school administration unless said newspapers include religious views. We will continue to watch to see if the case law is cleared up at all.
-Will Smock-Egan
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelwood_v._Kuhlmeier
http://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/get-informed/supreme-court/landmark-supreme-court-cases-about-students.aspx
Lindsey Freespeech was interviewed for a newspaper story in which she talked about the role her Christian faith had played in the past school year. The article quotes Freespeech as saying “The Lord has brought me to where I am today and for this I am ever grateful. May God bless this school.” The newspaper is distributed monthly around the Acropolis community.
Freespeech filed suit after the article was censored by the school district because they did not want the school to be portrayed as religiously biased. School administrator Michaelangelo Jones told the justice that “the school was simply acting in the best interest of the community. Acropolis High School has the right to be portrayed as they want in the community and should have the right to censor school-sponsored media as it sees fit.”
However, the student won the suit by pleading her First Amendment free-speech rights. The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech…” Freespeech felt that her rights were being violated when the newspaper was not allowed to publish her interview.
Three of six justices who voted in Freespeech’s favor cited the Tinker case from 1969. The justices of the time ruled that any speech in schools is free unless it directly prohibits learning. Justice Thomas Michaels said: “Learning was in no form prohibited by the publication of the school newspaper article. For this reason, the student press had a legal right to share the article containing religious language.”
Another judge, Justice Robert Thomas, cited Island Trees School District vs. Pico in his statement: “Court law limits the power of school boards to prohibit certain library books from being read,” he said. “It logically follows that a school’s power to censor the free press should likewise be limited. The student’s First Amendment rights were being violated when the school prevented her interview from being published.”
- Tony Williams
Sources:
http://www.splc.org/wordpress/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinker_v._Des_Moines_Independent_Community_School_District
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_Trees_School_District_v._Pico
A verdict was handed down by the Supreme Court today in the case Freespeech v. Acropolis High School. In a surprise move by the high school’s defense was defeated 6-3, the plaintiff, Lindsey Freespeech, won the case. For months the nation has watched with baited breath about what case law would be set. Lindsey Freespeech was interviewed for her school paper, “The Acropolis Bible Thumper,” in which she was quoted as saying “The Lord has brought me to where I am today and for this I am ever grateful. May God bless this school.” Many students approached the school administration to vocalize their discomfort with the language used. Subsequently the school asked for that issue to be discontinued and for the students, as school administrator, Michelangelo Jones, says “All students please try to use more all-encompassing language in interviews, we are a non-denominational public school and we should not let our religious views make our peers uncomfortable.”
Many experts expected the verdict to come in favor of the school. Despite objections that her first amendment rights were being infringed upon, Freespeech failed to recognize that the outlet for which she provided her sermon was under the heading of a public school and therefore not, in most people’s opinions, a proper place for her to express her religious views. Many people considered the case law to be established from such cases as Engel v. Vitale, Sante Fe School District v. Doe, or Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier.
Engel v. Vitale set the standard for the separation of church and state in school. In 1962 it was ruled unconstitutional for a school to play a prayer each morning. Despite the non-denominational aspect of the prayer it was still deemed unconstitutional as the word “God” was used throughout.
In Sante Fe School District v. Doe a school owned P.A. system was used to play a non-denominational prayer before the school’s football games led by a student. It was an optional prayer outside regular school hours. However when brought to the Supreme Court it was deemed an unconstitutional violation of first amendment rights, because the P.A. system was school property.
Doubtlessly the most talked about case law during the trial was that of the Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier. The principal of a high school censored aspects of a student led newspaper which he felt were inappropriate. Students contested that this violated their first amendment rights. in 1988 it was decided by the Supreme Court that non-private student newspapers are subject to a lower level of First Amendment protection.
Despite these previous rulings Freespeech still triumphed in her case. Experts are still attempting to decipher the new case law. In its current contradictory state it seems that high-school run student publications can be censored by school administration unless said newspapers include religious views. We will continue to watch to see if the case law is cleared up at all.
-Will Smock-Egan
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelwood_v._Kuhlmeier
http://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/get-informed/supreme-court/landmark-supreme-court-cases-about-students.aspx
Reflection
In this project, I worked with Will Smock-Egan to highlight the difficulty of interpreting Supreme Court case law. In the content section of our project, we looked at the 4th Amendment. Will and I decided to focus on case law, which states that every statement the Supreme Court issues becomes constitutional law for future cases. Because there have been so many cases with their own statements, strong arguments could be made for and against most cases, which was the basis for our newspaper articles. Though they focused more on the First Amendment and freedom of speech, the articles also related strongly to what we learned about case law.
I connected to this project as a newly hired journalist for the Animas Quill. Our article was about a girl named Lindsey Freespeech, who gave an interview about her religious views to the school newspaper. I thought it was fascinating to explore the various Supreme Court cases that gave evidence both for and against Lindsey's right to have her religion published in the school newspaper. The idea of school press and religion immediately drew my interest because I want to know what I can and cannot publish in the paper. Religion is fascinating because schools are both obligated to be religiously neutral while giving students the right to free speech. But which one trumps the other? Case law is an interesting and confusing topic that immediately drew me in.
If I could explore aspects of this project further, I would ask people in the school how they might respond in this case. I would ask teachers and Jake how they would respond to a clearly religious story being published in the Quill, and who they thought would be right in this case. I would also look at smaller, low-profile court case rulings about this kind of case to obtain a better idea of when the student has the right to express and when the school has the right to censor. I would also get a deeper knowledge on the two cases that most influenced the argument, the Tinker case from 1969 and the Hazelwood case from 1988. All of this research would help me to have more of a grasp on what I can and cannot do as a school journalist and aid my quest in bringing the news to the public.
I connected to this project as a newly hired journalist for the Animas Quill. Our article was about a girl named Lindsey Freespeech, who gave an interview about her religious views to the school newspaper. I thought it was fascinating to explore the various Supreme Court cases that gave evidence both for and against Lindsey's right to have her religion published in the school newspaper. The idea of school press and religion immediately drew my interest because I want to know what I can and cannot publish in the paper. Religion is fascinating because schools are both obligated to be religiously neutral while giving students the right to free speech. But which one trumps the other? Case law is an interesting and confusing topic that immediately drew me in.
If I could explore aspects of this project further, I would ask people in the school how they might respond in this case. I would ask teachers and Jake how they would respond to a clearly religious story being published in the Quill, and who they thought would be right in this case. I would also look at smaller, low-profile court case rulings about this kind of case to obtain a better idea of when the student has the right to express and when the school has the right to censor. I would also get a deeper knowledge on the two cases that most influenced the argument, the Tinker case from 1969 and the Hazelwood case from 1988. All of this research would help me to have more of a grasp on what I can and cannot do as a school journalist and aid my quest in bringing the news to the public.