Friday, November 28, 2014

Why Homeschooling is Hazardous - and Necessary

Parents Tasered, Sprayed, Handcuffed—as Kids Watch

"A child protective services (CPS) caseworker had been inside the home several days earlier to investigate a report of a messy house and had returned for a follow-up visit. When Jason and Laura declined to allow her inside she summoned Glidden and White.

When Deputy Glidden arrived at the Hagans’ home he demanded to be allowed inside. Jason opened the door and told Glidden that he could not enter unless he had a court order.

Glidden said he would enter anyway.

As Jason turned to go back inside, Glidden sprayed him with pepper spray—first at the back of his head and then directly in his face. Glidden also sprayed Laura, who fell to the floor. Glidden then turned to Jason, who was still standing, and shot him in the back with his Taser. As Jason fell, Laura closed the front door. Glidden triggered the Taser three more times through the closed door.

Sheriff White joined Glidden on the front porch. Together they forced open the door and found Laura and Jason lying on the floor. Glidden sprayed Laura in the face a second time while White sprayed Jason and tried to turn him over onto his stomach.

Laura shouted to the officers that Jason had been taken to the emergency room earlier in the week for chest pains. White nevertheless continued attempting to turn Jason over and sprayed him a third time when he was unsuccessful. The officers also sprayed the Hagans’ dog with chemical agent and threatened to shoot it if it didn’t stop barking.

Finally, the officers handcuffed and arrested Laura and Jason and charged them with resisting arrest and child endangerment.

All of this took place in front of the Hagans’ three young children, who were then taken to the emergency room to be evaluated for exposure to pepper spray.

At Jason and Laura’s trial, the judge determined that White and Glidden had violated the Fourth Amendment when they forcibly entered the Hagans’ home without a warrant. “The State has not offered sufficient, if indeed any, evidence of an exception that would justify a warrantless entry,” the judge wrote in his ruling. The case against Laura and Jason was dismissed.

HSLDA [Home School Legal Defense Association] is representing the Hagans in a lawsuit against the two officers who attacked Jason and Laura and terrified their three young children in their own home.

The Fourth Amendment strikes a carefully crafted balance between a family’s right to privacy and the government’s need to enforce the law. In most situations, government agents cannot simply force their way into a home. Instead, they must explain to a neutral magistrate why they need to enter the home, and they must provide real evidence to support that need. This rule applies to all government agents. Court after court has agreed that there is no social services exception to the Fourth Amendment."
The police are definitely suspected of potential for travesty such as this. Police Departments should purge offenders such as these from ever serving again.

All this was done in the pursuit of returning the children to control of the government schools. In Germany, the parents would be jailed and the children made wards of the state. Home Schooling must be protected and private schools must be accessible through vouchers; anything less is merely totalitarian child-mind-control.

1 comment:

Rikalonius said...

You synopsis is absolutely true and this scares me to death and enrages me at the same time. This homeowner and parent had to endure the savage assault by state apparatchiks and are lucky, very lucky, that the judge was on their side. This doesn't happen all the time. In a sane world the occupant should have been able to defend their home with lethal force but had they done that they would be serving life sentences.

It enrages me even more because I try to tell people that the police are getting out of control and all I hear back is what a paranoid right wing tea-bagger i am. This makes me sick. Not long ago in Atlanta I read about SWAT invading a home where a single accusation about firearm ownership had been made. The SWAT team tossed a flash bang inadvertently into an infants play pen causing terrible damage. No gun was found after 10s of thousands of dollars in damage were done to their home, and as is the case these days, the bureaucracy has determined that SWAT are a private agency employed by the city and cannot be held liable for damages.

Disgusting!