ramblings of a {sys,net}admin…

The Indiana Government finally does something right.

High school students are allowed to practice free speech online and are protected, the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled this week. A three-judge panel ruled on Monday that even if the speech is laden with expletives, what a student says against school policy or against the state is protected under both the US Constitution and the Indiana State Constitution.

The student, only named as A.B. in court documents, was originally sentenced to probation for six counts of harassment based off of comments she made on a MySpace page. The comments were posted to a fake profile created by another student posing as the principal of the school, and they were focused mostly around A.B.’s dislike of the high school’s policies and principal. She clearly indicated in her comments that she was aware that the profile was not real and that she was “pretty sure” she knew who created it. The principal, Shawn Gobert, testified that he never received any of the messages directly and only observed them as he was reading through the fake profile page.