T.J. says:

#63, you’re right; there’s no such thing as “habeous corpus.” It’s called “habeAs corpus.” Paddy-O spelled it right, you didn’t. If you knew how to spell it, you could have gone to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus_in_the_United_States and read, “Habeas corpus (/’heɪbiəs ‘kɔɹpəs/), Latin for ‘you [should] have the body’, is the name of a legal action or writ by means of which detainees can seek relief from unlawful imprisonment.” As to where “habeAs corpus” is in the Constitution, I refer you to Article I, Section 9: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

Any more trolling you want to do?

Paddy-O says:

# 69 LibertyLover said, “I’m beginning to wonder if they removed what was left of his brain during that surgery he underwent recently.”

Maybe we should issue a writ habeas cerebrum on Mr. Fusion.

Common_Sense says:

Mr. Fusion has a point about the POSSIBILITY that the kid is guilty of making the threat, and people shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it.(Though he should really be careful asking people to find things in the Constitution without checking to see if a basic internet search would show that it’s, you know, in the Constitution.)

The wrong argument is that he’s innocent or guilty. That’s just noise, because none of us knows the facts yet. From an IT perspective, what they’re saying “must have” happened is plausible, but there’s no way for us to know here on “teh interwebitubes”. I’m curious how the threats arrived, since they keep referring to his computer, and not his phone.

We could be talking about a kid with an open WiFi (abuse of which would result in the same external IP) or he could have downloaded some trojan allowing remote control of his machine. Easily. But we can’t know. The issue is whether or not justice is being done, and the initial (one sided) appearance is that this has been a heavy-handed treatment of a 16 year old.

For those that are interested, a few points:

Habeas Corpus refers to your right to not be imprisoned without just cause. So, therefore, technically the “right” is only being abridged if there is no just cause, which we can’t yet know. However, there is an exception for cases of “rebellion or invasion” when public safety is at risk, so you can bet your bottom dollar that those holding the kid would argue that they’re justified.

I would argue that the real concern here isn’t anything related to Habeas Corpus. I think the issue here is his 5th amendment right to liberty and due process. The problem of course being, it takes 10 lawyers to come up with 15 opinions on what either of those phrases actually mean.

It’s actually amazing that we have such a civil society considering how ambiguous the foundations of our legal system are.

Mr. Fusion says:

#66, Improbus,
#67, Jon,

OOpps, my bad, I had a real brain fart of that one. Thank you for the correction.

Mr. Fusion says:

#73, Common Cause,

Habeas Corpus refers to your right to not be imprisoned without just cause.

Habeous Corpus refers to several things, the concept of “just cause” being only one of them. Other, perhaps more important, ones include, the right to know the charges and the right to challenge the detention. I would think your exception (insurrection) refers to time of war.

The Marshall’s also took his computer. If they found anything on it the claim the address was “spoofed” goes out the window. In the router case though, the whole family would be in deep doo doo as they would not have known before hand which computer sent the messages behind the router. The Marshall’s had a specific warrant for the kid.

The family making the claim it was spoofed can’t prove otherwise since they don’t have the computer. Yet. The reasonable inference though would be that the kid was making crank claims and was caught.

In fact, this is just another criminal case. There is nothing happening in this case that doesn’t happen quite often in other criminal cases. The kid is being held because it is a serious charge.

Mr. Fusion says:

#79, Cow-Patty,

That shows that you didn’t view the video. The Judge has already put a gag order on the case which means he has already been before a Judge. Plus there is another hearing set for the near future. So where did the habeous corpus denial come in. OH right !!! It doesn’t.

Common_Sense says:

Mr. Fusion —

1. Read my name right.

2. I’ll stand by my description of the term habeas corpus. Your additional “perhaps more important” description is materially identical, except where you’re pulling in rights derived from the Bill of Rights — the 6th Amendment — and not from Art 1 Sec 9 on Habeas Corpus. I’ll assume we’re splitting hairs at that point, because what really matters is that these are constitutionally guaranteed rights, and not which section they come from.

(For reference what I mean is “the right to know the charges” comes from the 6th amendment, which grants the right “…to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation…”, which is not in Article 1.)

3. “I would think your exception (insurrection) refers to time of war.”

To be clear, my quotation was from the text itself, meaning that’s literally what the document states. Interpretation of that is subject to the judicial process, so my point was to convey that those holding the child could make a case (successful or not) that the child’s right to use a writ of habeas corpus does not apply. Since prominently, detainees at Guantanamo Bay were granted access to federal courts under such a writ, I think they’d lose — but the “War” on Terrorism and how constitutional law is applied to it is pretty murky.

4. I would refrain from making claims on the basis of evidence we don’t have. The “spoof” claim is just the family’s way of saying “he didn’t do it, therefore this must have happened” reflects their lack of sophistication. For spoofing to be the result, then whatever connection was traced to his machine would have to be UDP network protocol, because it’s impossible to spoof an IP over the much more common TCP. Some VOIP applications do use UDP, but now I’m wildly conjecturing. If the kid runs an open WiFi, that IP only traces the connection to his open WiFi router, and they’d still be stuck proving the communication originated from a PC he controlled behind the router.

It’s more likely that they WILL find something on his machine, at which point that’s still not conclusive — you can pick up any of a dozen trojans that allow remote control of a machine, which could mean the action could have been taken BY his computer but controlled not by his keyboard but by some hacker. That’s neither as easy as the movies make it out to be or as hard as you’d want it to be.

5. Yes, this is just a criminal case. The key question is still what I originally said it was:

“The issue is whether or not justice is being done, and the initial (one sided) appearance is that this has been a heavy-handed treatment of a 16 year old.”

Only time will tell. But only when the public watching can we be sure the government is being kept accountable to “we the people.” And so, I watch!

Wretched Gnu says:

I agree with my conservative friends here — the kid is clearly guilty of being detained!

Mr. Fusion says:

#85, Common Sense,

My apologies. You are again correct.

While I will often contract a name and if you piss me off I’ll corrupt your name, neither of those scenarios happened here. This was my own dyslectic mind confusing your handle with someone else.

Common_Sense says:

Mr. Fusion

– No harm done, and no worries. I similar reserve the right to be snide-name manipulator at some future point should the fancy strike me. =)

So, the latest news on the subject seems to show that the child isn’t even being held under the Patriot Act, as has been pointed out below. Not that this means that the kid is guilty, or innocent, or that the government isn’t overstepping on this issue, but certainly makes the whole thing look like a tempest in a teapot.

You’ve really got to wonder how the story ran with that obvious connection to the Patriot Act. Did the local news agency totally drop the ball and take the mother’s claim at face value? Did some agent, frustrated with the mother’s insistence that some right was being violated brush her off with the “Patriot Act says I don’t have to tell you anything and we pwnz j00”, or what?

Does local news not even aspire to be journalists anymore? I mean, surely the FBI wasn’t talking, but they also reported the local sheriff’s office was involved. Surely they could have found out the legal grounds for the charge and been in a position to confirm/deny the Patriot Act was being invoked as the legal grounds for the arrest.

This is depressing. It doesn’t change my opinion of the Patriot Act (well intentioned overstepping), but it sure changes my opinion of local news media, and not for the better.

Common_Sense says:

Just couldn’t resist one last tiny dig, or…?