Court Opinion

ID: 9494319
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:35:06.549125+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:21.087543
License: Public Domain

HANSEN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent. I would answer the court’s question (ante at 837) of “whether a reasonable person would foresee that J.M.’s letter could be interpreted by [K.G.] as a serious expression of intent to harm to her” in the affirmative. In my view, the record shows that the young lady who was the target of the threats considered them to be very real; so real that she took to sleeping with the lights on. As for the communication of the threats directly between the two young people, my reading of J.M.’s testimony is that he did in fact tell K.G. in more than one telephone conversation about the letters and that they contained threats to kill her.
*839The district court unnecessarily dignified the disgusting document J.M. penned by calling it a “composition,” as if it were something prepared for a creative writing class assignment. In the space of four handwritten pages, he used the f-word no fewer than ninety times, threatened four different times to kill his former girlfriend by lying in wait under her bed with a knife, and three times proclaimed that he would rape and sodomize her (using the absolute coarsest of language to describe how he would do so). The elected school board was in the best position to determine what scholastic sanction should be imposed on J.M. for communicating such a flagrant threat of serious bodily injury and death to another student in violation of Rule 36 of the school’s student handbook.7 Having reviewed the record, I conclude the district court erred when it overturned that decision and returned J.M. to the classroom. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.

. Rule 36 states: "Students shall not, with the purpose of terrorizing another person, threaten to cause death or serious physical injury.. .to another person or threaten physical injury to teachers or school employees.”