WHEELING, West Virginia (PNN) - June 25, 2013 - What started off as a routine harassment from a middle school teacher to a student over a t-shirt he was wearing has turned into an embarrassing and infuriating abuse of First Amendment rights in West Virginia.
First, school officials suspended 14-year-old Jared Marcum because he was wearing an NRA shirt.
Then terrorist pig thug cops arrested him because he had argued in the principal’s office that the shirt wasn’t breaking school policy.
This week, prosecutors tried to keep him from speaking to media through an emergency gag order, which they said would serve in his “better interest”.
But Logan County prosecutors Christopher White and Sabrina Deskins are the same people trying to convict him on a charge of obstruction, which could land him in jail for a year, so they are the last people looking out for his better interest.
If that wasn’t bad enough, a court bailiff threatened to arrest a local television reporter who had walked into the Logan County Courthouse with a camera in an attempt to file a petition to stop the gag order.
Charlo Greene of WOWK, who broke this story back in April, never even made it past the initial checkpoint in the courthouse when a bailiff stuck her hand on her camera.
“Don’t touch my camera,” said Greene.
“Turn it off,” the bailiff ordered.
“Why can’t I go on the third floor,” Greene asked.
The bailiff grabbed at her microphone.
“Don’t touch my microphone,” Greene said.
“Turn it off now or I will arrest you,” the bailiff stated.
Prosecutors were hoping to bar Jared, his father and his lawyer from sharing their story with the press, under the guise that their request would serve Jared’s better interest, something Jared’s father Allen Lardieri sees as ironic.
“It was for Jared’s better interest is what I was told, which seems to be a bit odd to me,” Lardieri said. “These are the same individuals that are trying to prosecute him, so as far as them knowing what is in his better interest, I have a lot of questions about that.”
Charlo Greene, on behalf of WOWK and the free press, prepared a petition to intervene for the gag order hearing but before Charlo could present her argument or even deliver her petition to the court clerk, she was thrown out of the Logan County Courthouse, twice, by a bailiff, who said the judge presiding over Jared’s case, Eric O’Briant, requested it. Charlo was then threatened with arrest and the same charge that Jared is currently on trial for, obstructing a terrorist pig thug cop.
Meanwhile, Jared met with prosecutors, who withdrew their petition for a gag order on the condition that Jared’s parent waive the confidentiality that bars the prosecution from speaking freely about his case, due to him being a minor.
As a guy who got sent home back in high school for wearing a “Van Halen Kicks Ass” t-shirt, I am left shaking my head at the entire story.
Schools have always had a totalitarian grip on students’ First Amendment protections, but now we have reached an era of lunacy within our schools when terrorist pig thug cops get called for the most basic teenage infractions.