Yet Another Teen Making Stupid Jokes On Social Media Now Faces Years In Jail

from the not-this-again dept

It's getting ridiculous just how frequently this sort of thing is happening. We had the so-called Twitter joke trial in the UK, in which Paul Chambers was arrested and tried for making a joke on Twitter about airport closures in which he (very obviously jokingly) "threatened" to blow the airport "sky high" if it wasn't reopened by the time he had to fly. We had the story of Joe Lipari, who was arrested for paraphrasing Fight Club on Facebook in expressing his annoyance with employees at his local Apple store. More recently, we wrote about high school kid Cam D'Ambrosio who was arrested and held without bail for making "terroristic threats," where those "threats" turned out to be some immature boastful rap lyrics that, when actually put in context, didn't actually suggest any threats at all.

The latest one involves Justin Carter, a teenager in Texas who made a joke on Facebook where he and some other kids were hassling each other over the video game League of Legends. One of the kids said something to Justin along the lines of, "Oh you're insane, you're crazy, you're messed up in the head." In response, Justin said:

'Oh yeah, I'm real messed up in the head, I'm going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts,’ and the next two lines were lol and jk.

In context, there is nothing surprising or odd at all about this conversation. It's how teenaged boys communicate. They get on each other and mock each other and the response was actually pretty reasonable. One kid called him insane, and he responded by effectively mocking the claim that he was insane. And then immediately followed it up with lol and jk to cement the fact that he was kidding -- which should have been obvious to everyone anyway, even without the caveats.

But... apparently it was not obvious to the police, or to some very confused woman in Canada who called the police.

Justin Carter was arrested the next month and has been jailed since March 27. He’s charged with making a terroristic threat and is facing eight years in prison, according to his dad.

It turns out that Justin's mother actually posted a comment on our last story about Cam D'Ambrosio, which I didn't see until just now, explaining much of his story as well, and linking to a Change.org petition trying to get her son released from prison.

Once again, this situation is insane. We've reached a point where media hype and moral panics are leading law enforcement to seriously overreact to anything they think is a threat. We have no problem at all with law enforcement checking in on situations like this, but they should quickly realize what it is and move on. To arrest someone for such a joking comment on Facebook, and then to keep him in jail and legitimately claim that it was some sort of "terroristic threat," is shameful and suggests that law enforcement is more interested in building up their "stats" than actually making sure that justice is served and the public is safe.

Filed Under: cam d'ambrosio, joe lipari, justin carter, overreaction, paul chambers, teenagers, terroristic threats

More Stories Of People Arrested For Making Joke Threats On Social Networks

from the investigate-and-let-it-go dept

Earlier this year. we wrote about a guy in the UK, Paul Chambers, who was arrested after he tweeted a message about blowing up his local airport if it didn't reopen in time for the flight he had to take the following week. The message was clearly a joke. Now, as I mentioned at the time, I have no problem with the police doing a quick check to make sure it's really a joke, but that's as far as it should go. Instead, the police ended up arresting him under the Terrorist Act and eventually charged him with a crime. They did not charge him with making a fake bomb threat (which is a crime) because they knew that such a charge wouldn't stand up in court. Instead, they charged him with using the internet to send a "message that was grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character." Chambers is back in the news, as he's now appealing his ridiculous conviction.

If you thought such things only happened in the UK, it turns out you'd be wrong. I was just listening to a recent episode of This American Life, which covered an amazingly similar situation, involving American comic Joe Lipari. After having what can charitably be described as a "bad" Apple store experience, he went home and was watching the movie Fight Club -- and got "inspired" by a famous line from the movie, and paraphrased it into a Facebook status reading:

Joe Lipari might walk into an Apple store on 5th Avenue, with an Armalite AR-10 gas-powered semi-automatic weapon and pump round after round into one of those smug, fruity little concierges. This may be someone you've known for years. Someone very, very close to you.

It's a pretty direct paraphrase from the movie. Yet, it took all of about an hour for a bunch of NYC police at his door, carrying machine guns and wearing bullet proof vests.

Just like the case of Chambers in the UK, rather than recognizing that this throwaway social media message, charges were filed against Lipari -- and they were pretty serious charges. There were two felony charges -- including one for "making terroristic threats." Rather than dropping it after recognizing this was joke, the case actually started out by going to court -- where the ADA even admitted to the judge that they knew Lipari was a comedian and this was a joke intended for his friends... but they still wanted to push forward. Lipari, to his credit, turned down various plea deals, believing that the whole concept of him being arrested and charged with this was ridiculous. The story ends with the ADA finally backing down, and the case is currently likely to be dismissed (though it hasn't fully been dismissed yet).

The similarities between Chambers' situation in the UK and Lipari's situation in the US seem pretty clear -- and neither are particularly flattering for law enforcement folks. Yes, obviously we still live in a time where "heightened awareness" to potential threats makes sense. But, at some point (and probably some point really, really early on), it should have become clear in both of these cases, that these were just two guys making stupid jokes via their social networking status tools -- and that's the point at which everything should have been dropped. That both cases went much, much further is a travesty, and suggests that law enforcement is wasting time on things like this, rather than real threats.

On a separate note, if you keep listening to the second story on that same episode of This American Life, it's yet another depressing tale of really questionable police activity, and how the police didn't just turn on a guy who tried to fix the system, but literally came up with trumped up charges to get him locked up in a mental institution without telling anyone. Folks in law enforcement talk about the respect that they deserve, but by doing things like this, they show they haven't earned such respect.

Filed Under: joe lipari, jokes, law enforcement, overreaction, paul chambers, social networks