Kentucky Asks Supremes To Declare Students Unpersons

Kentucky would never dream of questioning a corporation before reading its rights, of course.  But the Supreme Court has already established that corporations are not just persons, but super-persons whose rights supercede those of mere humans.

Brett Barrouquere at the Herald:

The U.S. Supreme Court was asked Wednesday to step into the legal debate over whether students must be informed of their rights before being questioned during an on-campus investigation of school-related activities.

Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway filed a petition with the high court. It seeks to overturn a Kentucky Supreme Court ruling granting students the right to be Mirandized before questioning by school officials if a resource officer is present.

In throwing out a student's conviction for sharing prescription hydrocodone with a classmate at a Nelson County school, the state court concluded that the presence of a school resource officer and the prospect of criminal charges meant the student should have been informed of his rights. That step is commonly known as a Miranda warning.

"No reasonable student, even the vast majority of 17-year-olds, would have believed that he was at liberty to remain silent, or to leave, of that he was even admitting criminal responsibility under these circumstances," Kentucky Supreme Court Justice Mary Noble wrote in April. "If he had been an adult under these same circumstances, there is no question that the statements would not have been admissible under Miranda."

It is an affront to democracy that this is even a question. That there are states where 17-year-old human beings have fewer rights than soul-less, obscenely wealthy criminal corporations.

And it's being handed to the corporatist Roberts Court by a man who's probably running for Kentucky governor in two years.