Police Blotter: Facebook photo convicts school aide of drinking charge
Police Blotter is a regular CNET report on the intersection of technology and the law.
What: Facebook photograph shows part-time teaching aide at Ohio high school with three cheerleaders holding Smirnoff bottles.
When: The Court of Appeals of Ohio, Twelfth District, rules on February 9.
Outcome: Conviction for allowing minors to possess alcohol upheld.
What happened, according to court documents and other sources:
Most people are merely embarrassed by photos a friend tosses onto Facebook. Mary Ellen Hause went to jail because of them.
Hause, who worked as a part-time teaching aide at Springboro High School, near Dayton, Ohio, was photographed in her basement posing with three cheerleaders holding Smirnoff bottles. The cheerleaders were friends with her son.
That photo, of course, ended up on Facebook. And Springboro High School Resource Officer Sgt. Don Wilson, who regularly poked around students' Facebook accounts, discovered it and turned it over to the local police.
Hause was charged with three counts of violating Ohio code 4301.69, which says no person "shall knowingly allow any underage person to remain in or on the place while possessing or consuming beer or intoxicating liquor," unless a parent or legal guardian is present and approves. (Underage person is defined as someone under 21 years old.)
State prosecutors alleged that Hause allowed the cheerleaders to consume Smirnoff, Sparks, and beer at her home and presented testimony from two of the minors who claimed that Hause participated in drinking games with them.
A second Facebook photo from the same gathering showed another minor holding a can of Sparks, a caffeinated alcoholic beverage.
For her part, Hause said that she didn't know at first that the cheerleaders were drinking, and when she found out, she kicked them out.
"I went downstairs and I saw the kids down there," she said, according to a report by the local ABC affiliate. "I sat on the couch and the girls -- they know me because of working at the school --they all jumped in my lap. And I did take the picture and I didn't notice anything right away."
Her testimony proved to be less than convincing: a jury convicted her and she was sentenced to 30 days in jail, a $500 fine, 10 days of trash pickup, and three years of probation that prohibits her from drinking alcohol or having it in her house.
"What should have happened when you discovered that these kids were drinking is that immediate action should have taken place... that all of these parents should have been notified and that your actions should have been very, very different," trial judge Judge Donald Oda II said, according to the transcript.
Hause appealed, saying the no-alcohol-on-probation rule was an abuse of the judge's discretion, that there should have been one charge instead of three, and the law is unconstitutionally overbroad. On February 9, an appeals court upheld her conviction and sentence.
The Dayton Daily News reported last year that the school decided not to punish the cheerleaders.
Excerpts from the recent opinion from the Court of Appeals of Ohio, Twelfth District, Warren County:
Appellant argues the trial court abused its discretion in imposing as conditions of community control that she not consume or possess alcohol and that she not have alcohol in her household. Appellant argues these conditions do not relate to the crimes for which she was found guilty.
The trial court has broad discretion in imposing conditions of community control pursuant to R.C. 2929.25(A)(1), which governs the authority of the trial court to impose one or more community control sanctions in misdemeanor violations, including residential, nonresidential, and financial sanctions, and any other conditions the court considers appropriate. We will not reverse such conditions imposed absent an abuse of the trial court's discretion.
A trial court's discretion in imposing community control conditions is not limitless, however. In determining whether a condition reasonably relates to the three probationary goals -- doing justice, rehabilitating the offender, and insuring good behavior -- a court "should consider whether the condition (1) is reasonably related to rehabilitating the offender, (2) has some relationship to the crime convicted, and (3) relates to conduct which is criminal or reasonably related to future criminality and serves the statutory ends of probation." In addition, the community control conditions "cannot be overly broad so as to unnecessarily impinge upon the probationer's liberty."
After reviewing the entire record, we find the trial court acted within its discretion by concluding the restrictions on alcohol use and possession as conditions of appellant's community control, as applied to appellant only, are reasonably related to rehabilitating the offender, have a reasonable relationship to the crime charged, are reasonably related to future criminality and serve the statutory ends of probation. Appellant was convicted of an alcohol-related offense-allowing juveniles to consume alcohol in her home. If she is not allowed to possess or consume alcohol or have alcohol in her home, it is less likely that juveniles will consume alcohol in her home...
Judgment affirmed.
Declan McCullagh, CNET News' chief political correspondent, chronicles the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics, technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan. 
I am a bona-fide geek - I love my tech and I love the net - but sometimes I do wonder what the cost will be of it all and at what point do the enormous benefits of our tech-dependant society stop out-weighing the cons. I guess for some they already have
Say I robbed a convenient store. My freedom of speech will allow me to stand on a street corner and announce I did it. I wouldn't get arrested for announcing it, but I'd get arrested for the robbery, and rightly so.
If you ask me, the scariest bit of the article is the line "High School Resource Officer Sgt. Don Wilson, who regularly poked around students' Facebook accounts". Why? What business does he have doing that? Are students at the school expected to add him to their friends so he can see what they get up to? Surely he has no right to spying on students personal lives like that. And why did he report this to the police when it happended outside of the school?
Just out of curiosity, what would the punishment have been if the photo had shown her taking kids pistol / rifle shooting without their parents instead?
Stupid is as stupid does.
I'm not against adults supervising underage drinking, my parents did it too. But they wouldn't let anyone go anywhere afterward for a number of obvious reasons (drinking and driving is dangerous enough when you're experienced behind the wheel, alcohol poisoning is a serious issue, unsupervised drunk kids tend to get into trouble ...). Plus they were smart enough to not allow anyone to photograph them boozing it up with the local kids and then post that picture on a public forum.
Stupid is as stupid does.
The only part of this story that disturbed me was the public school employee who gets paid to dig up dirt on Facebook.
...and let's remember that this is only after allowing the under-age drinking in the first place. Still no sympathy here, sorry.
I think her punishment is about right and I find it interesting that the only part of the punishment that she wanted overturned was the three year ban on drinking/possessing. Seems like she might have a problem if that part of the punishment is the most upsetting to her.
Also, to the person who says getting drunk is "what teenagers do" that may be his experience and may be true for a lot of teens but it is not universal and is certainly not something that is legal in the United States. You can argue for the legal drinking age to be removed or lowered but you can't just break the law as it stands.
And yeah paying people to snoop around on facebook, is the real crime here. Kids are going to find ways to drink, that's no surprise.
I feel bad for the teacher.
I don't pity this idiot anymore than the morons who videotape their crime sprees and post it on Youtube.
Scary thing is that somebody ELSE posts a picture of you on Facebook and tags it and viola! Incriminating evidence you didn't even know exists. Facebook break-ups must be reeeeally nasty!
I predict in a year or two, there will be somebody who gets in trouble from a picture which was Photoshop'd (GIMP'd?) by somebody else and posted.
I suspect Facebook will either have to clamp down on some of this content or somebody is going to come up with a more secure social web app and kids are going to start migrating.
And as to "OMG it's so unfair paying people to snoop around on facebook"... um, isn't that what we pay police officers to do, "snoop around" watching out for possible criminal activity? The photos were publically viewable, so it's no different than if the officer was "snooping around" in a public park and noticed underage drinking going on.
1. I don't agree with the arbitrary age limits imposed for considering someone an adult and allowed to drink. With different standards for other important milestones, it seems we have somewhat of a double standard.
2. There is nothing I loathe more than these busybody people who are hired to basically spy on other people. It's an invasion of privacy and should be outlawed before we are all goose-stepping our way to work every morning.
3. A large part of why teens drink is because it is their version of the forbidden fruit. If it were legal, you would see a lot less of it. They thrive on the challenge and risk of breaking the rules. Unfortunately most of the myopic parent's groups and legislatures fail to understand this. I think there should be one age, in all states, and it could cover everything from the right to vote, to keeping and bearing guns, to the right to have a beer if they want one.
4. Parents need to start looking in house for the signs that their children may be breaking the law and abusing alcohol. It's too easy to find a scapegoat and blame everyone but themselves for bad parenting.
5. My grandfather let me have my first beer at 8 years old. Now before you get all ruffled at him, please note that not only was he more of a father than my Dad was, but he died when I was 9. And no, it was not alcohol related, he had heart disease and it caught up with him at 64 years old. In no way shape or form did this turn me into an alcoholic. I maybe have one beer every 6 months. I never saw anything particularly special about alcohol. The ONLY time I got drunk was at a friends graduation party where I tried some homemade wine which turned out to be more like grape flavored sterno.. I never drink more than a couple of beers in a year and it really doesn't matter to me. My point is that if you are going to become an alcoholic, it's going to happen with or without these moronic laws that just cause bloat in the criminal justice system, and can scar a persons life with a police record for the rest of their life, for one bit of bad judgment.
We rely too heavily on laws and the courts to try and deal with issues which need to be addressed in the home, not in court. Nothing good came of this case, for anyone. I guarantee that those kids are still going to get drunk somehow if they want to. The criminal justice system has had to waste precious time, resources, and money to convict this woman and will spend more on keeping her incarcerated and fed. Her career in education is gone, and the kids probably will get a slap on the wrist and go get a beer.
The Internet was never meant to be a virtual lineup system, and it shouldn't be used as such. There is a difference between alerting people in some area to a possible sex offender living near them, and actively going out and looking for evidence of wrongdoing of an unspecified nature. Images can all to easily be altered. I work with graphics software every day on my home PC, so I know how easy it is to stick someone into an image. Using the internet in this way can lead to all sorts of issues.
What would happen if someone at a school became angry with another employee? If that person was fluent with common graphics software and had access to an image of the person they were angry at, it would be all to easy to put that persons head or whole body into a questionable image.
Evidence gained in this way whould not be allowed in court, or we risk innocent people being jailed for nothing.
And whether or not you agree with underage drinking is irrelevant. I think it should be 18 as well, but I wouldn't allow my kids' friends that were underage to drink in my house even if I allowed my own. That's for their parents to decide. Just because you don't agree with a law doesn't mean you don't have to follow it without taking responsibility for your actions.
Finally, this woman was not innocent or the victim of being photoshopped into a picture. She said herself that she sat down with the cheerleaders and allowed herself to be photographed with them.
The problem isn't so much that she allowed the kids to drink (at least to me). The problem is she joined in, entered into drinking games with the kids (encouragement to say the least!), let them take pictures of her crime AND THEN LET THEM DRIVE HOME AFTERWARD. Not to mention the obvious lie she told when she was caught (she didn't notice the vodka bottles they were posing with? Isn't that kinda saying to the judge "you're an idiot, I'm smarter than you, go to hades you fool"?)
She deserves everything bad that's coming to her.
Oh, that's right, becuase they were just kids, they were not responsible for their actions and so we have to find a scapegoat.
Getting jail for this is absurb. No wonder the US has the highlest ratio of population in prison than any other western country.
- by brad1020 March 24, 2009 7:07 PM PDT
- 30 days in jail, 500 dollar fine, 10 days of trash pickup and three years of probation is absolutely ridiculous considering the punishment for the people who were old enough to make their own decision and drink had zero repercussions, besides maybe a temporary suspension from the cheer leading squad.
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