A female high school student was punished for posting crude and insulting information about another student. Picture: File Source: The Courier-Mail
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THE United States Supreme Court has declined to take two cases involving three separate incidents involving free speech protection for public school students on the internet.
In all three cases students were punished for posting obscene and derogatory information on students or school officials by using their home computers.
In one cyber-bullying case, a female high school student in West Virginia was punished for posting crude and insulting information in 2005 about another female student on a fake page on MySpace.
A US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in July 2011 that officials at Musselman High School could punish the perpetrator without violating her free speech rights because they could reasonably believe that those comments would create a disruption at school.
In a separate case, Blue Mountain School District v Snyder, two students from Pennsylvania - one a high-school senior, the other an eighth grader - were punished for opening parody MySpace profiles of their principals in 2005 and 2007 respectively.In one fake profile the principal was depicted as a sex-crazed paedophile, while the other suggested that the principal was gay and used drugs.
A federal appeals court in Pennsylvania ruled in June 2011 that the students should not be punished because that interfered with their rights to free speech, because the posted information did not disrupt school activities.
The justices give no reasons when they decline to consider a case.
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