US teen jailed for school's daylight-saving cock-up

A Pennsylvania student was held in jail for 12 days after a bomb threat recorded by a school hot line service was wrongly attributed to him, Fox News reports. Fifteen-year-old Cody Webb, of Greensburg, "called a school district hot line to listen to a recorded message about school delays at 3:12am EDT on 11 March", his mobile …

[Ed]

So when did the DA get those requested records?

I am curious - how long did the innocent student remain in jail after the DA found the evidence that indicated he didn't do it?

I don't know that it happened in this case, but I have heard of prior cases where a suspect is held for several days after being found innocent by the investigators - and it always distresses me significantly (well, ok, there was one case I heard about where it wasn't so bad - the suspect was informed that he was found innocent, but would he mind staying for a bit longer, to give them an edge on tracking down the real criminal - and he was compensated for his time.)

However, in this case, I think it was shoddy work all along, in any event - the student's actual call should have been recorded as 2:12am EDT by the school's phone system. Of course, with due dilligence, they would have still arrested the kid, but after having found the message that he *did* leave, they would have let him go an hour later.

[Del Merritt]

Justice served?

"Me and God..."

Perhaps it was just after all, since the Grammar Police would surely have arrested him eventually.

[Jim]

Could he include the U.S. department of energy too?

Because he should sue the bunch of friggan morons that thought it would be a good idea to create y2k because y2k was such a non-event.

Awaiting the unix epoch.

[Andy]

Grammar Police + Thesaurus National Guard

I think they should look into the classification of WMD, or are they suggesting a thermonulcear or atomic bomb threat was phoned through?

Sounds as though the investigation was somewhat hasty.

[Chris]

I don't get it

Even going by their assumption that the times were accurate (3:12am for his call, 3:17am for the bomb threat), that's so inconsequential it's ridiculous. What's next? If I'm driving down a road, then the car behind me hits someone, am I going to be blamed simply because I drove down the road first?

This case seems cut-and-dry from a layman's perspective. Contact the phone carrier who supplies the phone line to the school, and look for the phone number. It almost seems like this is what they did, but they obviously didn't use too much brainpower if they thought nothing of the 5-minute time difference. Which, it could be argued might be a reasonable deviation. But that's easy enough to test for -- call the service yourself, get the call records for the inbound line, and compare the time of the call you just made to the time the system reported.

Either way, this is ridiculous. While I guarantee you a lawsuit will go nowhere (not even in the U.S. in a case like this against law enforcement), at the very least, he is due a public apology.

[Ian Strickley]

To Jim

Are we STILL bleeting about y2k Jim? Nothing happened at midnight, because it had all been fixed! If you took your car to have its brakes fixed, would you copmplain 3 months later that they still worked?

As for the story, sounds like the US is still tryign to find WMD's and are now trying to pin it on teenagers, (why not, isn't everythig else their fault lol ;o) )

[Tim]

WMD?

Firstly, are WMD's so widely available in America that even school kids have them? If so the extremists should probably give up because they're going to out done anyway. And secondly how big would the gap have had to be for them to discount the call as being seperate? 10mins? 30mins? 2 Hours?

I'm pretty sure a phone company would keep it's clock set accurately because it's used for billing, so if it looses 5 mins it's clearly not accurate and the bills would be wrong and they'd probably notice.

(when I set a clock I try and get it to the nearest minute so I wouldn't start 5mins of the real time.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Another Gauntanamo?

Is this the typical way threats to national security are handled in the States? I think that the whole attitude is heading towards a "guilty until proven innocent", " Guantanamo" style treatment of ANYONE suspected of such acts even before the case is investigated. That is very worrying. Is this a legal? Or is it terrorism?

Not in the free countries.

A Non. UK

[H2Nick]

Not enough brains, too much authority

Another example of people in power without an adequate processor in their head.

[Anonymous Coward]

WMD oh yeah!

Yes, a pipe bomb seems to be considered a WMD, according to the local custom of good-spirited hyperbole.

In 1998, McVeigh (him of the resolutely angry white supremacist wing) wrote: (http://lists.jammed.com/IWAR/1998/05/0053.html)

> I recently read of an arrest in New York City where possession of a mere pipe bomb was charged as possession of a "weapon of mass destruction." If a two-pound pipe bomb is a "weapon of mass destruction," then what do people think that a 2,000-pound steel-encased bomb is? I find it ironic, to say the least, that one of the aircraft that could be used to drop such a bomb on Iraq is dubbed "The Spirit of Oklahoma." <

So there you go. You know, Saddam had a few of those pipe bombs stashed away, and they are still looking for them.

Recent events have sadly shown that guns, traditionally considered as safe as toothpicks, are more dangerous than WMDs. It's not WMDs that kill people, it's people who kill people.