Circuit Court - Terrible (and wrong) Decision

Remember the 2015 incident in a classroom at Spring Valley High School. Yeah; that one.

The one where a "child" got into it with Deputy Ben Fields. Niya Kenny grabbed her phone and said some untrue things about Deputy Fields as he put the other girl on the floor. Had Kenny begun recording sooner, the public likely would have felt differently about the situation. 

Media failed to report the whole incident. Sort of like, later, when Sgt. Pentland got into it with a young black man in The Summit. I heard there were other videos in circulation about the Spring Valley incident. They were not favorable to the disruptive student. 

The incident prompted my first "nastygram" to Sheriff Lott. I believed he had fired Fields too quickly. I still believe that. I emailed him that there was no way he could have given Fields a full, fair, impartial investigation in only two days before he fired Fields.

I fully understood the racial aspects of the incident. But he threw Fields under the bus too quickly. And one of the reasons that the two girls were not prosecuted in Columbia was that Fields had been fired too quickly.

Soon after that, I talked with the son of a friend in another state about that incident. I had felt it was mishandled in the school. The son, who is a SRO, told me that the first thing that should have happened, after the Assistant Principal arrived, was that the teacher should have removed all the other students from the classroom. That would have removed the "audience" and been a good first-step in de-escalation.

The Assistant Principal should have then been able to get the minor student to leave the classroom and go to the office. If that failed, then you get the SRO.

Now the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, in Richmond, Va., has ruled in an appeal, saying in part, “The disorderly conduct law fails to give South Carolina’s schoolchildren fair warning about what it prohibits and vests practically unfettered discretion in those charged with its enforcement.”

Can you believe that hogwash? Just imagine the disruption that will continue to occur after a decision like that!

Read more about it here.