Judge Bans Sophomore From Violent Video Games After Threat

DooKey

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A sophomore at Lake Park High School in DuPage County in Illinois has been banned from playing violent video games after he jokingly said he was going to shoot up a school online. According to the charges he posted a picture of him playing a violent video game and him saying he was going to do a school shooting if people didn't stop talking about school shootings. His public defender said it was a joke in poor taste, but the prosecutor wasn't laughing. Personally, I believe he was trolling because of the so-called link to violent video games and mass shootings, but he probably should have thought twice before he posted what he did. Thanks cageymaru.

A police search of the boy’s Roselle home turned up no weapons, and his parents said in court that they did not keep any weapons in the home. Judge Robert Anderson released the boy, who spent the night in a juvenile facility, into the custody of his parents and ordered him placed on indefinite home detention.
 
So the judge basically grounded the 16 year old?
No phone, violent video games, and "indefinite home detention." What is the definition of indefinite and what is the legal timeline for that? Waiting for the school year to end, turning 18, turning 21? Does indefinite imply visits from a social worker or a psychologist to clear the student?

In my experience boredom is what leads to most kids getting into trouble...
 
I would normally balk at this sort of thing but the kid made a threat to shoot up a school. There's some debate as to whether he was joking or not but in today's climate if he wasn't taken seriously and THEN shot up a school then the public would go off their head. As for the punishment itself, I don't have much of an issue. The kid is, yes, basically being grounded by the judge since it doesn't seem his parents are willing to do anything about his shit behaviour.
 
Yeah, the Lego AR arrest I agree with, this is absolute bullshit. Too incongruent with the 8th amendment. Indefinite house arrest is cruel and unusual for any 16 year old, and likely to get him into more trouble and a lifelong distrust of the legal system as he sneaks out, is caught, and thrown back in the system... A system he legally has no representation to change, as well. That shit fucks you up for a long, long time.

16 year olds aren't careful about anything, especially with a controller in their hand. It's part of their physiology. Yes, he IS old enough to know better, but kids around his age - especially the normally adjusted ones - are highly impulsive.

Even his fucking quote is clearly a joke. Poor taste, yes. But a joke.

Word_Puzzle.jpg


I'd like to buy a vowel.

Whoops, see you after a brief stint in jail.
 
It was that or be thrown in jail proabably. A judge can actually throw you in jail for anything.
 
Can a judge actually ban you from a legal activity that has no basis in this case? As we know there is no actual link between violent video games and shootings. I am just wondering if this is technically legal?
Yes its legal, there have been several cases that made it to appeals and every one was upheld.
In particular with minors, it is most likely a first offenders program that basically scares the crap out of them and they come out of it with a clean record.
Indefinite means until the judge is satisfied he is scared enough and enough evaluations have been done to make sure it was just stupidity.
Of course the news just talks about the video game ban......

Edit: After looking at the location I am positive that is what is going on.
 
The kid has learned a great lesson in becoming a sacrificial lamb out of his own stupidity. I hope he can somehow survive it knowing that anything that's ever been said by him will be used against him one day.


I hope they also ban him from reading violent books, watching violent movies, and thinking violent thoughts.
Let's mind wipe him to a clean slate. That'll do him good.

So the judge basically grounded the 16 year old?
No phone, violent video games, and "indefinite home detention." What is the definition of indefinite and what is the legal timeline for that? Waiting for the school year to end, turning 18, turning 21? Does indefinite imply visits from a social worker or a psychologist to clear the student?

In my experience boredom is what leads to most kids getting into trouble...

That's just another word for house arrest. There's no timeline set to release the kid. Wait till the kid gets amnesty.
 
I would normally balk at this sort of thing but the kid made a threat to shoot up a school. There's some debate as to whether he was joking or not but in today's climate if he wasn't taken seriously and THEN shot up a school then the public would go off their head. As for the punishment itself, I don't have much of an issue. The kid is, yes, basically being grounded by the judge since it doesn't seem his parents are willing to do anything about his shit behaviour.

Well we're a society that's as lazy as it gets. We aren't critical thinkers. We aren't doers. We don't espouse excellence. We support mediocrity, apathy, 'object' and 'everyone else' blaming. America is its own worst enemy.
 
i would have thought a complete psych eval would have been ordered, at the very least.

If I were the Judge, I'd have ordered that he be brought to the site of the next school mass shooting to see first-hand why people are taking all this so seriously and have no sense of humor about it.

After seeing a few corpses with fresh holes in them he might have a whole new perspective regarding his sense of humor.
 
................................................ Indefinite house arrest is cruel and unusual for any 16 year old, and likely to get him into more trouble and a lifelong distrust of the legal system as he sneaks out, is caught, and thrown back in the system... A system he legally has no representation to change, as well. That shit fucks you up for a long, long time...................................


Cruel and unusual ? Hmmmmmm.

Please allow me to add some scope to what cruel and unusual is.

Do a Google search under Images for the following search terms

Pol Pot Khmer Rouge

After that, we can revisit cruel and unusual from a shared perspective.
 
Be careful what you post online the thought police are monitoring everything.
This is the opposite of the thought police. This kid is being punished for his stupid actions, not his thoughts.
His actions: saying, "I'm going to shoot a school" while posting pictures of him playing an FPS shooter
HIs thoughts: I'm just kidding...
 
Can a judge actually ban you from a legal activity that has no basis in this case? As we know there is no actual link between violent video games and shootings. I am just wondering if this is technically legal?

Doesn't matter anymore. Judges are making up laws as they go now days. Someone needs to keep these dictators from doing such things. We vote in congress / senate to pass laws, not judges.

I do not agree with this kid did. I do think an eval is necessary as someone suggested above.
 
The psychological evaluation plus community service would have made sense to me. (even though realistically every one of us understood the "joke") Dumb teens make horrible and offensive and semi-dangerous jokes all the time. It's just that they are posting them and filming them these days that are making them criminally actionable. I can't count the number of times I heard "I'll kill you.. you dumb ass." between different idiots in highschool. Sometimes it was in reference to sports performance. Sometimes it was about a smackdown. Sometimes it was about (don't go near my sister). Etc etc... The new teenage post every thought online phenomenon just doesn't mix with typical juvenile idiocy.
 
Can a judge actually ban you from a legal activity that has no basis in this case? As we know there is no actual link between violent video games and shootings. I am just wondering if this is technically legal?

Wait, it has everything to do with his case, not the case of an actual school shooting, but the case the kid was being judge for, posting an image from a violent video game as part of an online threat. It's directly related and relevant to the kids bad actions.

Look, I'm not calling for blood here, and no, I don't buy into the link between violent games and school shootings. But the kid posted a joke poorly concealed as a threat, and a lot of people have no sense of humor right now, especially Law Enforcement after the FBI's poor handling of a threat made far enough our from the actual shooting, that they would have had time to intervene if found credible.

So to recap, there was nothing unrelated about this Judge's order.

See, what the kid did was either wrong, or not wrong. For the kid to have been judged in the wrong and action taken, he sort of has to be guilty and that means the Judge could have been pretty hard on him. Someone else thinks this order is "cruel and unusual", I don't. It was stupid, and he's guilty and could have been sentenced much more severely. Fortunately this Judge is accepting that the kid wasn't making a credible threat and sided on the bad judgement angle and went easy on the kid.

Now it's up to everyone else, you can back the Judge's determination or coddle the kid and destroy what the Judge is trying to do for him. It's not the Judge who is setting the kid up for a bad time, it's people who think the Judge was too harsh on the boy and want to support him as if he did nothing wrong.

My 2 cents.
 
Punishment didn't fit the crime. I'm not a judge, but 20 hours of community service with a parent sounds more fitting. And continued monitoring.

Kids who can joke like this are out of touch with the community that made their life (and their parents ') possible.
 
The psychological evaluation plus community service would have made sense to me. (even though realistically every one of us understood the "joke") Dumb teens make horrible and offensive and semi-dangerous jokes all the time. It's just that they are posting them and filming them these days that are making them criminally actionable. I can't count the number of times I heard "I'll kill you.. you dumb ass." between different idiots in highschool. Sometimes it was in reference to sports performance. Sometimes it was about a smackdown. Sometimes it was about (don't go near my sister). Etc etc... The new teenage post every thought online phenomenon just doesn't mix with typical juvenile idiocy.


I heard them too as a kid but they have always been actionable. It's not that they are online, that just makes it easier to prove. What is different is that kids are doing things they didn't used to do. The threats have greater credibility, and the targets of the attacks are less specific, more random almost.

It's not that there haven't been shootings at schools before, it's the nature of the shootings that is changing. Most shootings at schools in the past were not mass shootings in the sense that the targets everyone at the school. It was typically a principle, a teacher, a coach, a girl that found another guy, another guy that took someone's girl, someone who directly did something to provoke the attack. One or two kids planning attacks with explosives and weapons and ammo that indicate the targets are pretty much everyone they can get their sights on, this is a relatively recent change.
 
To everyone saying he got what he deserved for posting a threat i submit the question: Why has no action been taken against Madonna for saying she though an awful lot about blowing up the White House? How do both these situations compare?
 
@Icpiper That is very good point that I had not considered till now, and I believe the spectacle around mass shootings is what causing / motivating this shift.
 
To everyone saying he got what he deserved for posting a threat i submit the question: Why has no action been taken against Madonna for saying she though an awful lot about blowing up the White House? How do both these situations compare?


Madonna can't tie her own shoes, the threat has to be credible lol

No, more seriously, you want to know and what the hell, I suppose I'll do the research and find out for you since I have entered into this discussion already.

Madonna was speaking within view of the White House so I have to think that the District of Columbia is the right place to start checking. Now this is just a lawyer's website but maybe it will suffice unless you want actual text from the applicable laws.
https://www.jpmlawyer.com/bad-words-and-where-they-often-lead-d-c-threats-simple-assault/

On the one hand;
Consequently, when you use words intended to communicate threats to others, you could be facing misdemeanor and even felony D.C. Threats charges.

But on the other hand;
To convict you of misdemeanor or felony threats, the government must prove that you (1) intentionally (2) communicated threatening words to another that would (3) cause a person to reasonably believe that they would be seriously harmed if you carried out your threat.

So in Washington D.C., the prosecution would have to show that a reasonable person would believe that Madonna might seriously try to harm them.

So I think it's safe to say that either they didn't actually feel threatened by her comment or they didn't believe they could prove that they felt threatened.
 
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Think of how new and exciting video games will feel like after a break like that.

Anyways, People in general need to stop looking at everything through a polarized lens. We want the government to protect us and prevent these tragedies, but once they do something that tries to stop someone from doing this, we look at it as if it were some terrible crime to punish someone for making a threat. Yet just recently we want to hang people for not taking a threat seriously. So which do people want? If I were to post one here (not that I would, cuz you guys are cool) would it be credible? or would it only be a credible threat after the crime were to occur?
 
As in many laws in the US, much will depend on which State becomes the legal playground, they don't all define crimes the same way or use the same bar for proof. As I recently posting, in DC it comes down to whether the court decides that a reasonable person would have felt threatened by what was said. Not so much as if it's credible, but credibility from the perspective of the target of the threat.

If we make the assumption that the same bar is used in this case with the boy, when the school heard or received this threat, would a reasonable person believe that there was real risks.

Because of this, this sort of requirement for a conviction could become a wildly shifting target.

If I said "I'm going to shove a moose down your throat and gag you to death" sounds pretty unlikely until such time as people start being found asphyxiated by moose injection :nailbiting:
 
I’d just play violent video games anyway.

I would just set my console/puter to private offline mode and go nuts.

Fuck that. They can’t even keep track of parolees and he’s gonna enforce that? Good luck.
 
Gotta love Hard Forums; where researched and thoughtful comments are accompanied with death by asphyxiation through moose ingestion.

Also @Icpiper - The laws you described make sense - just the reasonable person aspect of the law seems (from laymen perspective) to leave potentially large room for error / misuse.
 
Gotta love Hard Forums; where researched and thoughtful comments are accompanied with death by asphyxiation through moose ingestion.

Also @Icpiper - The laws you described make sense - just the reasonable person aspect of the law seems (from laymen perspective) to leave potentially large room for error / misuse.


I don't disagree, that is an important part of what I was saying, you know, the moose thing ........
 
You have head of SWATING have you not? You know where that one AH got the kid killed. How about going into a movie theater and start yelling FIRE. In the mass exit stamped several people get trampled. But it was just a joke right. "I'm gonna shoot up a school", bad choice of words you little dick head.
 
Its all them damn Vidga games fault! :oldman:

Now, where's my pills?!
 
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