The more things change, the more they stay the same.

18 April 2007

Cody Webb, age fifteen, was arrested last month for making a bomb threat to his school's information line. He spent twelve days in juvenile detention for the act. There's just one problem: He didn't call in a bomb threat. As authorities figured out later, the school's automatic message recording system automatically changed its internal clock to take into account Daylight Savings Time. Therefore, the timestamps of all calls received after the changeover were one hour off from those before the changeover. When they pulled the call records, they accidentally went too far back and pulled Cody's telephone call from the Caller ID records.

On top of all of this, the voice that placed the bomb threat sounded nothing like Cody, but that didn't deter principal Kathy Charlton from proclaiming Webb the culprit and calling the police. When reason attempted to prevail, she was quoted as saying "Well, why should we believe you? You're a criminal. Criminals lie all the time."

When last I checked, suspects were innocent until proven guilty, regardless of their age.