The fact that it's opinion is why I brought it up. Most might agree that it would have been okay to cut this girl some slack in this case, but if you start making exceptions when you feel like it opinions start to matter a lot more, and then you will have to deal with subjective views too. Equality under the law is around to prevent unfair treatment (overall rather than in individual cases) and helps prevent resentment due to some getting off easier than others. There are laws where circumstances play a big role (like self defense vs bloodthirst when hurting someone) but if the laws related to the article do not fall into that category then there's not much to do.

I think the bigger issue isn't that this one girl was sent to prison for not attending public school.

It's that the law is set up to throw kids in prison for not going to school in the first place.

I was in Special Ed classes and I still have a lack of education due to a disability I have and the fact the schools I went to concentraited more on making next best Heisman Trophy winner then caring about academics and even though I graduated with a diploma, I would gladly give it back for a second chance to go back to the 9th grade and drop out of high school and get a GED instead. In the end my education would probably be about the same level. Still Schools shouldn't have truancy anymore specially crappy ones after the 8th grade or just no truancy period. Cause in reality after the 8th grade you can pretty much make it in life---it's not easy but you can still make it.

personally, i'd be more lenient with a "truant" who's on the honor roll & with two jobs than a "student" with perfect attendance that wont even try to pick up a pencil or help

(yes, I know of someone like that)

Being serious?

The law makes a lot of exceptions. Ever heard of self defence? That's an exception to the law that you can't kill people. And it's just one of thousands -- probably tens of thousands -- of exceptions.


That's one viewpoint. Another viewpoint is that, wherever a judge has any kind of discretion (with regard to determining guilt or even sentencing), that judge will always exercise that discretion subjectively, because his choice will be coloured by his life experiences, his ideology, his religion, etc.

Judges aren't robots. They're humans. So subjectivity is a constant in law.

Many legal systems allow for factors which can influence judgments, because they realise that context matters.


Well, yes, but that kind of begs the question. If everyone did have the same circumstances, there would be no way to treat them unequally. Some legal systems are based on the idea that exactly because there is inequality, different accused/perpetrators should be treated differently.


^ P.S. When did BSF become like this? ^

I haven't been gone that long ...

All of this and she'll probably just burn out and not make anything of her impressive skills. A sad but common fate. Though to call helping another as not good is certainly false. Just that if she was hoping to do something with those grades she might burn herself out.

Edit
It's not just a BGSF response, it's an everyone response. People don't like do put themselves out there it can be risky. It has to affect a large amount of people, or be truly horrible before people start doing anything.

Then what is the point of having a judge and lawyers?

THIS is what I have been considering.

Oh, I don't know. People who've suffered have a lot of reasons to keep going.


I was referring more to the sarcasm ...

Sounds like a obvious coverup something else is going on there.

I am startled and disgusted. This subject of conversation makes me heavily disgruntled in that I might actually make an enterprise to deter this sort of disagreement from happening once more (only if it's a casual conversation at a midday fair or a written letter of dissent I can sign with an eloquently scribbled John Hancock, let's not get capricious, you can't conjecture for me to indubitably rise up and take action).

Good point. Though there's a difference between using the room given for subjective judgement by the judge (where it's specified, such as with self defense) and doing whatever you think is right.

No, I'm not that way, but in general, I'm pretty black and white about the law. If a man commits murder, he should be arrested, regardless if the man was a pedophile who touched his kids and was thus killed. As painful as it is, the laws the law. Am I happy some pedophile gets off scott free while some minor criminal is sentenced to 50 months in prison for....stealing a tele or something? No, I'd personally rather we just hang criminals who do real wrong. I try to look at law as a set of logic, but sometimes it's hard to do, because human opinion comes to play. Were I to have it my way, I'd give that girl a little slack, and suggest she drop this stupid vanity pursuit and just try to balance her life more efficiently.

Edit: But my opinion doesn't matter to much since I'm more fond of frontier justice than overly silly laws picking at semantics.

She got what she deserved, she should have gotten an excuse for her absences. You can't not go to school and not get an excuse for your absences, honor student or not.

If that had been me, i would have been [censored] screwed!

I'm trying to think of the right thing to link here. Either Judge Dredd, or Rorshach.

I remember when I got myself intentionally suspended in highschool for faking my absence from the school payphone in order to get some extra time off to work on a project that was due to the following week.

They suspended me for two days and said i'd make a terrible criminal.

Up here, education is treated as a right but not a requirement. That's not to say that it's easy to get a job, a good one, without an education, but no one is forcing anyone to go to school. You're given such freedom that it becomes counter-productive if the responsibility of the freedom isn't understood. Every teacher I've had, have openly stated to all students "you're free to come and go as you want, though that's a bad idea".

The only consequence of not giving a crap about school is the lack of a formal education, and by extension, any other problems that may arise from that lack. But at the end of the day, there's no threats aside from the consequence I mentioned. And that consequence is pounded into your head from, in particular, eight grade and onward. Another thing that is also in high focus is not necessarily good grades, but rather as little absence as possible and good behavior. Positive intiative is more treasured than good grades. That's not to say grades don't matter, but they don't matter the most.

However, in the case of this thread, something like that would very likely be applauded up here, balancing two jobs and school isn't easy. And while the girl in question could have made an effort to find a more reasonable balance point, it seems very counter-productive to punish her for the mistake of not doing so. She obviously cares about education and her family. If anything, the school should've offered some kind of assistance or made exceptions, realized that she's working hard to get everything in place, which it seems like the school was already aware of. Such lack of action is even more irresponsible than the girl's lack of action to fix things.

Is it me, or did the girl have a really crappy lawyer?

Oh well, at least thanks to the publicity, next time around she'll have Johnny Cochran.



No, she won't. Apparently, he's dead... DOH!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIUmLbXyKaQ

I'm a little indecisive about this subject, at first I thought "OK, she broke the law when she should have quit school and took care of her family instead of trying to do both and failing at attending school", then I thought "Waaaaaiiiittt, the legal system gets involved in missing school? That doesn't sound right, she should have just been expelled from school, no need for judges and lawyers, until she filed suit against the school for expelling her."
Yea, she broke the law and her life svcks, but having a law like that seems idiotic at best.

Note- I'm not following the BGSF answer provided earlier, I do my own thing.

I don't agree with the judge choosing to make an example of her, but she is legally required to be in school. I'm not saying I agree with that law...especially when someone is keeping their grades up. It's important to understand, though, that we don't get to pick and choose whether or not the law applies based on arbitrary criteria. If laws worked that way they'd be completely ineffective (and probably used unfairly and inappropriately even more than they already are).

Sounds great in theory, but what criteria do you use to decide who the law applies to, and do you have the manpower to enforce a more complex set of rules?

Yeah, but he's still Johnny Cochran...

If the government wants to supply us with an education system, fine. They could do worse. But frankly, it is none of their business to raise anyone's kids. No one should ever be punished by the state for not attending school; any reasons the state could bring up to support their actions (curtailing truancy? more like trampling non-conformists) are simply irrelevant.

Should those people that dropped out of school be allowed to collect welfare later in life if they can't find an employer that will hire them? I'm just playing devil's advocate here because I'm trying to look at it from the point-of-view of the government. Not only that, but at what point is the government responsible for protecting kids from irresponsible parents (if at all)?