The Allen Lee Affair: A Question of Justice

Maggie C

1/5/15

The Allen Lee Affair:  A Question of Justice

“For more than forty years, the United States courts have recognized that students do not check their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse door.”

—Judge Michael Davis (Tim Cushing, 1)

Allen Lee, a straight-A student (NEWS SERVICES, 1) in Cary, Illinois, was arrested near his home on April 24th, 2007 (Long and Starks, 1) and charged with two counts of disorderly conduct.  The possible repercussions might be as high as thirty days of incarceration per charge and, together, fines of up to $3000.  As a result, the young athlete (Wendy, 1) was suspended indefinitely from school and notified by his recruiter that his marine enlistment was being nullified due to the misdemeanor charges.  What did Allen Lee do wrong?   

He turned in his homework.   

Shortly before the arrest was made, Allen Lee was asked by his creative writing teacher, Ms. Capron (Keeshan, 1), to turn in a free-writing assignment in which, according to Lawyer Thomas Loizzo, he was to “‘Be creative; there will be no judgment and no censorship.’” (Associated Press, 1)  However, in the wake of a college shooting in West Virginia, Allen’s work was determined to be not only inappropriate for school but, evidently, inappropriate for society.  

After turning in his assignment Ms. Capron took the paper to the principal and school psychologist who determined that Allen, in writing about drugs, shootings, alcohol, profanity, and necrophilia, was not just a trouble-maker but a criminal. (NEWS SERVICES, 1)

It makes sense, with the Virginia Tech Massacre only a week behind, that the school would be on high alert for any signs of mental or emotional disturbance in their students; under that kind of duress, responding with fear, anger, and worry is all perfectly natural and understandable.  What is not understandable is the arrest of a student for doing what he was told.

Many Americans don’t ponder their rights too deeply—growing up without making waves or causing a fuss, they feel safe and secure in the knowledge that, for their purposes, America’s protections are absolute.  Without paying attention to the world around them, they fail to understand just how brittle the system is and how much trouble every small infraction can cause.   

Historically speaking, it’s clear to see that the law favors a restriction of human rights while students are on campus, and in the eyes of many that seems relatively fair.  Still, the subject can leave a child—or even an adult!—feeling a touch ambivalent.  When you’re dealing with the futures of young adults, not just the shaping of their minds but, potentially, their ability to procure and keep a job, how much restriction is too much?

Because Allen Lee is a citizen of the United States of America, I posit that his incarceration was unjust, unconstitutional, and that the school was completely out of line in involving the police.  As citizens of the United States of America, children are entitled to protection under the first amendment of the bill of rights, which states that:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”  (Congress, 1)

This amendment asserts that we as citizens of the United States are entitled to speak and write essentially whatever we please to.  To quote the adage, it’s a free country, and within the bounds of this country, Mr. Allen Lee wrote freely.

Allen insisted that he was encouraged to express himself freely, without censorship or stopping to think about what he was writing, which is, according to the Allyn and Bacon Guide to Reading, exactly how a free write is to be conducted (Ramage, Bean, and Johnson, 32–33).  The entire point is free association, allowing the mind to ramble so that you can figure out the directions you need to take in order to complete an assignment.  If she gave the class a free write assignment without a goal she shouldn’t be surprised at the results, since a teenaged free write without direction is bound to run a course straight through the teenage mind.

Even if Allen’s essay was without any academic merit and miles outside of the curriculum’s atmosphere, the matter should never have exceeded school level.  Allen did nothing but write whatever came to mind, which is, to be quite frank, the opposite of a crime.  Even the school’s claim of disorderly conduct can hardly be counted as more than a sham; while Allen Lee admitted to wanting to “rile” Ms. Capron (Keeshan, 1), his attempts don’t even count as an attempt to incite a riot, since to incite a riot one must actually desire a riot to occur and be joined by at least two more individuals (Matson, 1), and the charge, very specifically:

Shall not be deemed to mean the mere oral or written (1) advocacy of ideas or (2) expression of belief, not involving advocacy of any act or acts of violence or assertion of the rightness of, or the right to commit, any such act or acts (“Incite,” 1).

To all appearances, Allen’s essay included no advocacy of violence—according to his explanation of his essay, most of it is made up of song quotes, nonsense, and ramblings about his future military life and his dislike of his teacher (Poulsen, 1), none of which happens to be a crime.   

Being an honors student, Allen should have known better than to attempt to get a rise out of his teacher, but the police had no place in pressing charges for a juvenile attempt at a prank.  If the school actually cared about Allen Lee’s mental or emotional well-being, or even the safety of the rest of their students, they would have first asked Allen to explain his essay or speak with the school psychologist, not forced him out the door with his future crumbling in his hands.   

To have someone—anyone—arrested for what they’ve written creatively is an absolute travesty, going against the very founding principles of our nation.  If an adult were subject to the same treatment, the courts would find it completely impermissible; the police might not even bothering answering the call, and if they did then the case clearly would have been thrown out immediately as a violation of the first amendment.  

Schools, meant to assist students in their personal and public growth as human beings and future productive members of society, are put into a unique position of power that allows them to quite literally control the fates of their students—with a properly placed phone call or a misplaced email, a child’s dreams can be brilliantly and brutally pulverized.  Mr. Allen Lee stared down the barrel of that gun and watched the legal system quiver with their finger on the trigger, his military dreams in shambles until at last Ms. Capron and Mr. Thomas Lazzio came to an agreement and all charges were dropped, allowing Allen the chance to re-enlist for service in the marines.  (Keeshan, 1)

Ultimately, for Allen, things turned out okay—but they had the very real potential to not turn out okay.  Because someone else had committed a crime nearly seven hundred miles away a week before, Allen was treated like a rioteer for the sake of completing an assignment unsatisfactorily, all in the name of “safety”—not his safety or the safety of the other students either, since he who gives up freedom for safety is neither safe nor free, and allowing such a violent reaction to such an ambiguous paper would set a precedent of incarceration for any student who wrote something that a teacher felt was “inappropriate.”  

There are those who might believe that Allen’s punishment was just, supporting the decisions of the administrators due to such passages as, “So I had this dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P90s and started shooting everyone…, then had sex with the dead bodies” and “Blood sex and Booze. Drugs Drugs Drugs are fun. Stab, Stab, Stab,​ S…t…a…b…, poke” (Poulsen, 1) and the proximity of this event to the shooting at Virginia Tech, in which a young man took 32 lives and then his own (Associated Press, 1).  It is the fundamental belief of these individuals that safety comes before freedom, especially in the case of children in a school setting, and to some extent they’re correct.   

According to the 1985 case of New Jersey v. T.L.O., students can expect to experience reduced privacy and freedoms inside school grounds, but according to Tinker v. Des Moines, unless students cause a disturbance large enough to distract the class they continue to be protected by the first amendment.  A creative essay featuring violence, turned directly into the teacher without stirring up the student body, therefore violates no laws, and should not have exceeded the school’s reach if and when punishment became a concern.  If in fact, in Indiana, it is a law that “disturbing writing” is counted as disorderly conduct (Landmark, 1), Indiana is breaking the federal law, and this case could have easily gone through to the Supreme Court if pressed; as said by Judge Rosemary Pooler, “The protection of free speech cannot depend on a listener’s veto; if a listener or reader misinterprets a comment, that is not the speaker or the writer’s fault.”  (Hilden, 3)

Additionally, all individuals in America are to be assumed innocent until proven guilty, and the addition of a second charge in relation to the temporal proximity of the VT and CG cases (Associated Press, 1) assumes that, first of all, Allen was inspired by the VT killer, and second, that Allen was somehow involved in the VT killer’s case.  

Allen may have been inspired by the killer—when school shootings happen, they tend to worm their way into everyone’s minds, planting seeds in their subconscious—but he made no indication that he would be following in the boy’s footsteps, and threatened no one.  The one remark he made that could be really worrisome was “No quarrel on your qualifications as a writer, but as a teacher, don’t be surprised on inspiring the first cg shooting,” (Poulsen, 1) but it was not, in and of itself, a threat, and thus was not illegal.   

There was also no evidence to support any claim that Allen could have been an accomplice to the killer, which is exactly what he’s being accused of when the killer’s actions are being used to heap more punishment upon Allen.  The actions of others are irrelevant when trying or arresting an individual—if a young woman smoked marijuana while her neighbor was being murdered and the police found out, she would be arrested for drug possession, not murder; if one purposeful car accident occurred a week after another, no one would assume that the second driver was “inspired” by the first.  How then does it make sense for Allen to be doubly charged for a single offense?  

“But he should have known better than to write that,” someone might say, “he deserves to be punished,” and I see where they may be coming from.  I concede that his actions were inconsistent with the moral code demanded of him by the school, the report being laced with profanity and such, and while I do hold that Ms. Capron’s insistence that the students were not to censor themselves should have exonerated him of the charges (you should not, after all, demand an absence of censure if you do not want an absence of censure), the school was well within its power to give him detention or ISS or any of the million-and-one such punishments they have in their repertoire.   

If the school was really concerned about Allen Lee’s mental health, they should have called his parents, had a talk with him, and possibly sent him to the school psychologist.  There are so many more paths they could have taken before asking law enforcement to step in.  If he posed a real threat to society, would he have passed his psychological entrance exams for the marines?  Would they not have been able to decide that he was too spitfire to be ranked among them before he was accepted?  

Some believe that all mentions of violence in writing point to a twisted and dangerous mind, but it may have been his inability to continue to express himself which could have caused him to snap.  My mother is a Master’s-level Psychologist working as a Behavioral Intervention Specialist for Pathways.  She’s worked in her field for more than a quarter of a century and she often has her clients keep private journals just so that they can get rid of the ideas bouncing around their heads; “You have to get it out,” Mary B. Coates once said, “and if you can’t talk about it, the only way is to write, draw, or act upon the impulse.”   

I myself have never seriously hurt another human being, yet I write about violence almost constantly.  Violence of all kinds, from a timid fistfight between brothers to bloody murders over trust funds, all the way to the horrors of necro, pedo, and all those other philias, are a part of everyday life.  Not a pleasant part, no, but a part nonetheless, and writing is about life, the truth both good and bad, ugly and euphoric.  To write about these things makes no one “evil” or “twisted” or “wrong.”  If it did, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, and Nabokov might have some explaining to do.

It seems to me that the biggest issue here is Allen’s vehemence toward his English teacher, which he expresses openly.  No, it’s not a nice thing to do, but what teacher alive never attempted to make one of their professors uncomfortable at some time or another?  Even the most respectful students I know have attempted to get a rise out of their teacher at some point or another. As valedictorian of my class, I once spent twenty minutes trying to convince my Trigonometry teacher that English was better than Mathematics, simply because I was better at English and I took pleasure in trying to gain the upper hand.   

Granted I liked that teacher, and I didn’t intend to hurt his feelings in any way, shape, or form, but if a student cannot express their dislike for a teacher, how are we to know if the teacher is doing wrong?  Does a student just stand by when a teacher bullies one of their fellows because they don’t want to get in trouble?  Should they be less passive-aggressive in their approach and confront the teacher directly?  Can there possibly be a right answer?   

It all comes down to this; the fact of the matter is that when Cary-Grove High had Allen Lee arrested, they broke the law.  In a single blow, without first trying to discover what was actually meant by Allen’s essay, they could have destroyed his entire future—sixty days in jail might have cost him his chance to graduate with his class, his marine enlistment, funding for college, the whole nine yards.   

One of the definitions of violence is “injury by or as if by distortion, infringement, or profanation” (“Violence,” 1), and in their neglect of US law and internal policy, the Cary-Grove school district injured Allen Lee and his future both by distortion and infringement.   

Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez once said that “The systematic disregard for children’s basic constitutional rights by agencies with a duty to protect and serve these children betrays the public trust.”  (Mohr, 1)  I have a teacher who likes to say that if you don’t understand something, half the class is likely sitting there hoping you’ll ask the question they’re too afraid to, and it’s important to draw the connection.  The betrayal of the public is also a betrayal of the individual, and we cannot forget that the infringement of one child’s rights is indicative of hundreds, maybe thousands more, who either don’t know that they’re being infringed upon, or have been silenced by faculty, family, or officers of the law that don’t themselves understand the kind of harm they’re doing.   

Therefore the violence enacted against Allen Lee was violence enacted against mankind itself, for where one freedom flies, the rest fall with.  It was not Cary-Grove’s place to call for the  arrest of honors’ student Allen Lee; it was instead their place to protect him, and had they not pulled the charges, I’m certain that the courts would have agreed.   

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