[Politech] MIT student picking up friend at airport nearly shot, charged with "infernal machine" crime [fs]
Declan McCullagh
declan at well.com
Fri Sep 21 15:33:42 PDT 2007
An MIT student named Star Simpson was apparently picking up a friend at
Boston Logan airport and wore a sweatshirt with a breadboard and some
LEDs and a 9V battery. She had created it for a student career day.
Big mistake. She was nearly killed by police (armed with semiautomatic
weapons that some jurisdictions prevent law-abiding Americans from
owning) who surrounded her. State Police Maj. Scott Pare actually told
the press that she was "extremely lucky she followed the instructions or
deadly force would have been used... She's lucky to be in a cell as
opposed to the morgue."
Star was charged with violating the state's hoax device/infernal machine
law, which shows you just how officious -- and perhaps even crazed --
police and prosecutors are nowadays. That law provides up to five years
in prison.
As I wrote back in February after the Aqua Teen Hunger Force incident,
for prosecutors to win their case, they must prove that (1) Star
transported the LED-sweatshirt (2) "with the intent to cause anxiety,
unrest, fear or personal discomfort." (3) Also, a person must
"reasonably" believe that the LED-sweatshirt was (4) a "device for
endangering life or doing unusual damage to property, or both, by fire
or explosion." See:
http://politechbot.com/docs/massachusetts.infernal.hoax.device.020107.txt
Obviously the state will lose this case, but filing charges is more
politically convenient than admitting the cops made an error, or at the
very least admitting that the student was just wearing a harmless
sweatshirt. Here are the "infernal machine" cases in which the state
*did* win -- when the devices actually were dangerous:
http://politechbot.com/docs/massachusetts.infernal.machine.cases.020107.txt
More:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/21/mit-student-arrested.html
http://wbztv.com/topstories/local_story_264104114.html
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/21/1849208
http://www.politechbot.com/2007/02/02/aqua-teen-hunger/
-Declan
_______________________________________________
Politech mailing list
Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/
Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
----- End forwarded message -----
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
More information about the Testlist
mailing list