Most stories are. Many rape cases, for instance, are unsubstantiated and are simply one person’s word against another.
Indeed.
But the point is that the father intitally had every reason to believe his daughter. It’s just that his response was more like a Viking than an adult in our society.
While I see what you are saying in a way, I don’t quite agree in that I think he should bear the full weight for his inability to control himself. That’s almost a “devil made him do it” arguement. She shouldn’t have lied, and especially not the kind of lie she told which has such potential to do irrperable damage. But he still has full responsibility for his actions IMO, because she wasn’t in immediate danger, and he had to go seek the teacher out to fight with him.
Not sure about that. In California the punishment (maximum) for a normal assault or battery is 6 months.
Certain special cases bring about a more severe punishment, for example hitting a police officer, interfering with a medical professional in the course of performing emergency medical care, and one of the special cases is assaulting anyone on school grounds. These special cases bump the punishment up to “not exceed one year.”
The definition of felony varies from state to state. In many states the definition of a felony is any crime for which you could potentially serve more than one year in prison, any crime in which the maximum sentence is not greater than one year (like for example California’s maximum punishment for assault on school grounds) is defined as a misdemeanor.
Some states define any crime in which prison time is involved to be a felony.
From my brief reading of the California penal code they seem to operate with two basic definitions of felony. One, is any crime in which you may be incarcerated in a State Prison (versus a county jail) is a felony. They further elaborate that any crime which is defined as a felony will be punishable by at least 16 months in prison.
Then they say that exceptions to these above two rules exist whenever specified. So I’d have to dig more through the penal code to find out if assaulting a teacher constitutes a felony, under the basic definitions in CA it would not, but it could be specified as such by specific statute.
Either way, hitting a teacher would if you got the absolute maximum sentence result in a one year incarceration in California. The probablity of someone actually getting that maximum sentence would be fairly low, since a prosecutor would probably immediately offer something lesser for example six months, in exchange for not making him bother with a trial. Depending on the circumstance he may let you walk away with a $1000 fine and probation.
Anyways, it may have been wrong to hit the teacher but I think we should give people some leniency for emotional distress, we do with EVERY OTHER type of crime.
No, but it is a mitigating circumstance that most court systems would weigh heavily when deciding what sort of deal they might cut or in the event of a conviction what sort of sentence to hand down.
I don’t think so, although I also don’t think that any non-aggravated assault is a big enough deal to warrant someone getting rich off of subsequent civil litigation. Someone shouldn’t be paid hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in damages if they actually only suffered $25 in damages.
I would just like to point out that the weregild system was actually a fairly effective brake on this sort of behavior. Like our legal system, it placed a premium on not taking immediate retributive action.
BTW, every time I’ve ever gone to my kids’ schools, I had to sign in and state exactly what I was doing there. Who let the angry dad wander the halls in search of the man who wronged his daughter? Or did dad misrepresent the reason for his visit?
One more thing about finding out that a teenager was full of shit when s/he made this kind of amazingly horrible accusation. The phrase “Believe the Children!” brings to your face a cynical smirk, rather than a sympathetic nod.
Anyone in Florida can identify this station? The reports are not saying what station did this.
Too true. Due to some family illness (etc.) issues I had to take care of my niece & nephew for awhile and every time I showed up at school to pick them up I pretty much had to have the “NON CHILD STEALING/MOLESTING UNCLE” placard strapped to my forehead. I was actually glad of it. Those school administrators weren’t about to give those kids up to me even when the kids themselves ran up to me shouting “uncle Lev, uncle Lev!”
How does an irate parent enter a school and punch out a teacher?
Geez Louise. In one of my schools with only 400 hundred students, two of the teachers were forced to resign on sexual molestation and harassment charges on the same day.
That is such a non-communicative comment to me. What does it mean? I taught for twenty years in public schools, but none of the teachers were members of a union. Tenured teachers taught in both urban and suburban schools.
Allegations of sexual misconduct usually make headlines in the media here. Even when unsubstantiated, those accusations follow for the remainder of your carreer. They also affect personal lives.
Anyone who assaults a teacher while on duty should have an extra penalty to pay. (I spent seven hours in the emergency room and three days in the hospital after being knocked unconscious by someone in a group of trespassors. He was given probation.)
Not around here.
I’m in schools pretty much weekly, doing animal presentations for the zoo. I’ve often wandered around looking for the office or a teacher and have never been confronted. Nor have I ever had to sign into a school. Heck, come to think of it, I don’t even carry ID, just my zoo shirt and a clipboard with my info sheet and invoice. (My assistant does the driving, so no DL needed.)
This is hardly a small town either. A lot of our work is right in Vancouver and the surrounding area and it’s almost all elementry schools.
I’m a girl, but I don’t believe my male boss ever had an issue with “checking in” either.
What it means is that someone who has taught for a number of years and has a good reputation might be able to bounce back from such an accusation. Case in point: recently in the Boston area, a popular teacher was accused of having sex with a student. He was booked and arrested - but students and parents were on camera saying they didn’t believe the accusations, that he was a great teacher and had taught many of their kids, etc. He also looked to the age of a teenager’s dad. Contrast that to a new teacher, who’s fairly young and may appear to be the close in age to the students themselves. He may not have the benefit of years of dutiful service. For some parents, students, and teachers, the first they’re hearing of this guy is in relation to a charge of sexual misconduct.
In my experience, a teacher who is a member of a union knows their rights to due process, having counsel, and what the district can and cannot do. When I first started teaching the principal in my school seemed to have it in for me. He came in my classroom at will, wrote messages about what was lacking in my instruction on the board, and demanded that I turn in my lesson plans at the start of each week. A few days later a teacher who I didn’t even know told me that I needed to join a union and talk to the representative about what my principal was up to. I did, and guess what? He stopped all those things. Turns out in my district, you couldn’t require a teacher to turn in lesson plans unless there was some disciplinary reason to do so. (Of course he could request to see them.) My rep apparently had words about his observations and from that point on, his observations were done formally with written reports.
My next-door neighbor was, like me, a first-year teacher, not in a union. Guess what the principal started doing to him? Same shit he did to me previously. Only he didn’t join the union. At the end of the year, the alternate certification teachers are recommended by their principals to get their certification, or they are extended - which means more money, more classes. I wasn’t doing a perfect job but certainly doing well enough to earn a recommendation from my principal. The other first-year teacher on our staff was also recommended. Guess who was extended? (The story has a happy ending though - my buddy was recommended midyear and the principal was reassigned after computers went missing from his office.)
Some administrators are bullies and will harrass new teachers because they know they can’t do it to the veterans, and because they don’t feel any responsibility for helping to develop the rookies. Having the backing of a union rep, and knowing that if any shenanigans ensue, that teacher has access to resources like an advocate or counsel can really help - in my opinion - alleviate this stuff. If the union rep is a respected member of the faculty it may also buy the accused some credibility with the other teachers - reminding them of due process and so forth.
It was S.O.P. for us to call the union rep if something like this were to happen. They would send an advocate to deal with the press, etc.
“eotape of the teachers aid on the opposite side of campus when the incident is alleged to have happened.”
sometimes the surveillance society is the polite society
Speak to us of weregild, for I have never heard of it before.
We’re not sure of what details she gave the Dad. Molested and being touched inappropriately can be two different things.
Sure I understand him feeling that way and having the impulse to beat the crap out of the guy but after having two teenagers I would sure as hell want to hear both sides of the story. Teenagers can misunderstand things, exaggerate or any number of things. Let’s say a teacher patted my teenage daughter on the ass, or made an inappropriate comment laced with obvious inuendo. I would want the school officials to be aware. I’d want them to interview other students to see if this had happened to anyone else. My daughter is shaken emotionally but otherwise unharmed. This is the kind of thing she will probably have to deal with as an adult. We may have Mama and Papa Bear instincts but we’re not fucking bears. If the guy had waited a week to see how the school was dealing with it he would have dicovered the truth.
I understand him wanting to look the teacher in the eye. Even then I would try to guage if it was all a misunderstanding. Perhaps the teacher called his daughter a liar or something which prompted the punch. We don’t know.
Either way he was wrong wrong wrong and when he found out he owed everybody especially that teacher, a huge apology.
Read the article. Or one of the several previous posts in this thread that mention this topic. The father was invited to the school to have a meeting with administrators and his daughter so that his daughter could present her side of the story. The teacher’s aide wasn’t present at the meeting, so Dad went off vigilante-style and hunted him down in his classroom and decked him.
I wonder what the radio station is saying now?
ivylass, Mama Bear will kill me if she perceives me as an immediate threat to her cob. She will NOT come down the hills into town to track me down and maul me the next day.
Gotta protect that corn. 
Close, but no cigar. That colon should be a semicolon.