History
In January 2002, Joseph Frederick, a student at JDHS, unfurled a banner reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" across from the school in an effort to get on television as the Olympic torch relay passed the school. The principal at the time, Deborah Morse, took the banner from him and suspended him for ten days, on the grounds that the banner opposed the school's mission and anti-drug policy. On March 10, 2006, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that Morse had violated Frederick's right to free speech, overturning an earlier Alaskan federal court ruling. Judge Andrew Kleinfeld wrote in the court's opinion, "Public schools are instrumentalities of government, and government is not entitled to suppress speech that undermines whatever missions it defines for itself." Frederick was also cleared to seek damages from Morse.
On December 1, 2006 the United States Supreme Court announced that they agreed to hear an appeal of the case; it is Juneau School Board v. Frederick, 06-278. On June 25, 2007, the Supreme Court reversed the Ninth Circuit, holding that the school district did not violate Frederick's First Amendment rights.
Read more about this topic: Juneau-Douglas High School
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)
“It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgement.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)