Katie Sierra free speech case
In October 2001, Katie Sierra was suspended from Sissonville High School, near Charleston, West Virginia, for activism in opposition to the War in Afghanistan.
While a circuit court initially upheld her suspension in November, a trial by jury in July 2002 concluded that Sierra had been justly suspended and forbidden to wear political shirts, but had been improperly denied the right to start a club.
[2] While she had no prior history of academic or behavioral issues and was used to acclimating to new environments,[5] Sierra clashed with her Sissonville High School classmates' culture, especially in the pro-war fervor following the 2001 September 11 attacks.
[7] Students in the high school tended towards traditional social roles, flew the Confederate flag, enrolled in Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps, and were almost universally white.
[6] In contrast, Sierra, 15 years old and in ninth grade,[2] identified as an anarchist pacifist and opposed both the War in Afghanistan and all forms of violence.
[7] Dismayed by both the September 11 attacks and the resulting war in Afghanistan, Sierra set out to start an anarchist club at her high school as a means to promote peace and pacifism.
[7] That night, watching television images of Afghani children killed as collateral damage in the war,[10] Sierra wrote to a friend about feeling helpless and needing to take action.
She wrote in black marker on a red T-shirt she would wear the next day: "When I saw the dead and dying Afghani children on TV, I felt a newly recovered sense of national security.
The principal suspended Sierra from school for three days on the charge of disrupting the educational process, both for having not followed his prior order to desist flyering for the club and for upsetting other students.
The meeting discussed the events of the previous week, and some board members were initially sympathetic to Sierra,[7] but she was soon shouted down, accused of treason and likened to a traitor.
[13] Students spat on Sierra's mother's car at Sissonville High, and her friends' parents wouldn't give her rides home from school.
[4][7] Circuit Court Judge James Stucky rejected Sierra's request for a preliminary injunction on November 2,[16] ruling that her rights to free speech were subject to not disrupting the school, which her anarchy club and political shirts would do.
To packed galleries,[22] Sierra's pro bono lawyers, Jason Huber and Roger Forman, argued that Mann was responsible for the school's disruption, having not taught his students about tolerance and constitutional rights and having exacerbated the situation with misleading comments to the media.
A local adjunct philosophy professor testified as Sierra's final witness, including explanations of the philosophy espoused by Sierra's proposed club, its impact on American social and political movements, and the notion that anarchists had historically been unjustly persecuted in American courts, citing such examples as the trials of the Haymarket affair and Sacco and Vanzetti.
The lawyer for the school officials countered that anarchism had prominent ties to terrorism and assassination, and referred to Timothy McVeigh and Theodore Kaczynski as anarchists.
[24] The court ruled that Sierra had been justly suspended and forbidden to wear the T-shirts, but had been improperly denied the right to start a club, and awarded her the $1 in damages she sought.
Following the case, attorneys for both parties asked Judge Stucky to throw out the jury's verdict for being internally inconsistent, encouraging him to instead issue a ruling himself.
[27] Judge Stucky subsequently ruled that she would be allowed to sit General Educational Development tests, which would let her to apply for university in lieu of finishing high school.
John Tinker, the lead plaintiff from a 1969 free speech in schools Supreme Court case pledged his personal support for Sierra.
