The Highest Court in the Land with a 6-3 decision has limit the first amendment for high school students.
The Supreme Court ruled against a former high school student Monday in the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner case — a split decision that limits students’ free speech rights.Joseph Frederick was 18 when he unveiled the 14-foot paper sign on a public sidewalk outside his Juneau, Alaska, high school in 2002.
Principal Deborah Morse confiscated it and suspended Frederick. He sued, taking his case all the way to the nation’s highest court.
I thought 10 days was a bit much for holding up a sign, this is what I found:
“She suspended me for five days and I couldn’t believe I was being suspended for a free-speech experiment,” Frederick told KTUU-TV. “And furthermore, after quoting Thomas Jefferson, ‘Speech limited is speech lost,’ Ms. Morse (the principal) responded, ‘You’ve just earned another five-day suspension.’ ”
I do not agree with what was on the banner, in fact he has admitted that his intent was to get on TV as the camera for the Olympics, he saw the phrase on a skateboard and thought it would get a reaction. I believe the fact that the rights of students have been limited is despicable; we want young people to vote and grow up and be great, contributing members of our society, yet when tell them that they really do not have the same rights as adults because you are in high school.
I will leave end with a quote from the dissent written by, Justice John Paul Stevens:
“This case began with a silly nonsensical banner, (and) ends with the court inventing out of whole cloth a special First Amendment rule permitting the censorship of any student speech that mentions drugs, so long as someone could perceive that speech to contain a latent pro-drug message.”
A Politico 