The jury's finding Wednesday that Virginia Tech was negligent in its reaction to a campus gunman who killed 33 people, including himself, in 2007 could play into the politics of a growing movement to allow college students to arm themselves on campus, reports the Christian Science Monitor. Families were awarded $8 million after the jury found the university waited too long to notify students that a gunman, who turned out to be a student named Seung Hui-Cho, was walking the campus.
The verdict is a point that gun-rights groups say they'll pick up and use to argue for states to allow legal gun carry on college campuses. “It's hard to tell what implications this ruling will have on colleges in the rest of the nation, but I think it does serve to put them on notice that they are liable for student safety,” says David Burnett, spokesman for Students for Concealed Carry, a group founded after the Virginia Tech shooting. “I think it will make it easier for us to point to these financial penalties and say, 'Virginia Tech may be able to assume those liabilities, but can you as a college afford to spend $100,000 per victim if, heaven forbid, you're the target of the next shooting?' ”
Read full entry »A prosecutor's statement that Thomas M. "T.J." Lane III, the Chardon, Ohio, teen who authorities say shot and killed three high school students and wounded...
Read full entry »A third Chardon, Oh., High School student has died in the shooting attack by T.J. Lane, 17, on Monday, says the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Lane, 17, appeared...
Read full entry »T.J. Lane, accused shooter at Ohio's Chardon High School had violence in his life from the beginning, says the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Court records show his father had been arrested many times for violent crimes against women in his life, including Lane's mother. More than once, police or courts warned him to stay away from the boy and his mother. Authorities said the teen walked into the high school cafeteria yesterday and aimed it at several boys. In the end, three students were seriously wounded and two were killed.
T.J. Lane is to appear in Geauga County Juvenile Court today. A statement from his family said, "This is something that could never have been predicted. TJ's family has asked for some privacy while they try to understand how such a tragedy could have occurred and while they mourn this terrible loss for their community." Fellow students said the 17-year-old was quiet. Some said he was sweet; others said he had a simmering temper. His Facebook page, now deleted, had a photo that showed him bare-chested, glaring down toward the camera. In another picture, dated 11 days ago, he is sitting on a bed peering out from behind a giant teddy bear with a heart that says, "Be Mine." He listed his interests as anime and primitive hunting.
Read full entry »A student at Chardon High School in suburban Cleveland died today after a shooting spree that left four others injured, police told the Cleveland Plain...
Read full entry »A girl, 8, was shot and critically wounded yesterday in a third-grade classroom in Bremerton, Wa., says the Seattle Times. Bremerton police believe the...
Read full entry »In the chaotic minutes after a fatal shooting yesterday, Virginia Tech officials were forced to test emergency procedures put in place after the 2007 campus rampage that resulted in 33 deaths, the Christian Science Monitor reports. Officials used Twitter to send a campus lockdown notice to students seven minutes after the 12:30 p.m. shooting of a campus police officer, who was making a routine traffic stop. The school said the gunman, who approached the officer on foot, fled on foot.
Soon after the shooting, a second person believed to be the gunman was found dead of a gunshot wound in another campus parking lot with the weapon nearby. In the April 2007 massacre, Virginia Tech officials were criticized and fined for waiting two hours after the first bullets were fired before issuing a campus alert. Virginia Tech now is appealing a $55,000 fine imposed by the U.S. Department of Education for violating the rules of an emergency notification policy in the 2007 shooting.
Read full entry »The scandal that ended the reign of longtime Penn State University football coach Joe Paterno is emblematic of a parallel judicial universe that exists...
Read full entry »The U.S. Department of Education has scheduled a December 7-9 hearing on Virginia Tech's appeal of $55,000 in fines for failing to notify campus sooner in a 2007 shooting rampage in which a student killed 32 students and faculty, the Associated Press reports. Virginia Tech officials have denied wrongdoing, saying the department is holding them to higher standards than were in place the day of the shootings.
"The relatively small monetary penalty is not the reason for this appeal," Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli said. "The university has already expended millions as a result of the tragedy. The main purpose of the appeal is to compel the federal Department of Education to treat Virginia Tech fairly and to apply a very poorly defined and subjectively applied federal law consistently and correctly." The agency found the university violated a federal campus safety law by waiting more than two hours after two students were shot to death before sending out a campus wide warning. By that time, student gunman Seung-Hui Cho was chaining shut the doors to a classroom building where he killed 30 more and then himself.
Read full entry »Almost half the people shot at by Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies after reaching toward their waistbands turned out to be unarmed, reports the Los Angeles Times. "Waistband shootings" are particularly controversial because the justification for the shootings can conceivably be fabricated after the fact, according to a new report by the county monitor, that analyzed six years of shooting data.
The monitor was careful to point out that the report wasn't indicating that deputies were being dishonest, simply that those shootings left the department vulnerable to criticism. Merrick Bobb, who was hired as a special counsel to county supervisors after a 1992 report exposed serious problems in the department, also found an increase in shootings in which deputies didn't see an actual gun before firing. In those cases, the suspects may have had a weapon but never brandished it. Those shootings jumped from nine in 2009 to 15 last year, according to the report. Last year also saw the highest proportion of people shot by deputies who turned out to be unarmed altogether.
Thousands of school kids have been suspended or expelled across Massachusetts — especially in suburban districts — as superintendents and principals get tough on everything from bullying to drug dealing, reports the Boston Herald. “We’re all just in a time where there’s more accountability,” said David Fleishman, who has been superintendent for a year in Newton, which saw a 36 percent increase in incidents prior to his arrival. “We’re reporting everything more.”
Among the incidents reported by school officials involving students are: smoking, drug possession and sales, fighting, sexual harassment, stealing, making threats, carrying knives and less serious offenses, such as skipping school and acting up in class. A review of Department of Education data at 28 urban and suburban school districts between 2007 and 2010 shows huge increases in the suburbs and decreases in big cities in reported incidents. In South Hadley, there was a 17 percent increase — from 230 reported incidents in 2008 to 268 in 2010, the year 15-year-old freshman Phoebe Prince killed herself after being bullied. In Milton, reported incidents increased 46 percent, and in Marshfield, reported incidents increased 78 percent.
Read full entry »The lessons of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado may have helped prevent violence in Tampa this week, says the Christian Science Monitor...
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By Julia Dahl
A growing movement is training police officers not to kill citizens — even when they seem to be asking for it.
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By William Claiborne
Nieman Watchdog has an interesting article about why gun massacres don't occur in Australia. Some excerpts from the article," Firearms in Australia, as in the U.S., have been a basic part of the culture. But in 1996, after a gunman killed 35 people and injured 21 more, a conservative prime minister took the lead and the country rapidly enacted powerful restrictions."
Read the article here.
The Justice Department is reviewing the Seattle Police Department to determine whether its officers have engaged in a pattern of unnecessary force, particularly against minorities, reports the Seattle Times. The federal action responds to a request by the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington and 34 other community groups that asked the Justice Department to investigate police use of force in several recent high-profile incidents, including the fatal shooting of John T. Williams.
U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan met last week with officials from the Police Department and the office of Mayor Mike McGinn, representatives of the City Council and some of the community groups pushing for the investigation. Durkan, who has been deeply involved in use-of-force issues concerning the Police Department for nearly a decade, said she is concerned enough “to take the additional step to see if there is a systemic issue that needs to be examined and changed.” She said, “Any time you start to see a number of complaints, you’re obliged to ask whether there might be a [] cultural problem. Smoke does not always mean there is fire. Our obligation is to determine whether there is a fire.” Reported confrontations include an officer kicking and threatening to beat the “Mexican piss” out of a prone Latino man; the repeated kicking of an African-American teen during an arrest inside a convenience store; and the pummeling of an African-American man in a police lobby.
Link: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2014026946_justice25m.html
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