First Amendment Speech

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On January 23, 2002 a senior at Juneau-Douglas High School, that goes by the name Joseph Frederick, was excused from his classes, with the other students, to watch the Olympic Torch pass by in his town of Juneau, Alaska. Him and his friends went across the street and waited for the TV cameras to start rolling to unravel a banner that they made that said “Bong Hits 4 Jesus”. The principal, Deborah Morse, soon saw the banner and ran across the street to intercept their act. Principle Morse says he was prompting illegal drug use at a supervised school activity. Frederick claims that his first amendment rights were violated. At first, the principle told Frederick to put away the “offensive” banner, but after Frederick didn’t comply with her, she …show more content…
In 2007 the United States District Court of the District of Alaska took in favor of the Principle and the school board, saying that Frederick 's first amendment rights have not been infringed, and used the Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District as example, to show that the school did not violate his rights. Chief Justice Roberts, who was writing for the majority, “concluded that the school officials did not violate the First Amendment.” (Wikipedia) The Chief Justice made three legal determinations to back up the conclusion. He stated “that school speech doctrine should apply because Frederick’s speech occurred at a school event. Second, that the speech was reasonably viewed as promoting illegal drug use. Third, that a principal may legally restrict speech-based on the three existing First Amendment school speech precedents, other Constitutional jurisprudence relating to schools, and a school’s important-indeed, perhaps compelling interest in deterring drug use by students”. (Wikipedia) It was said that “the majority acknowledged that the constitution affords lesser protections to certain types of student speech at school or school-supervised events”. (US

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