2008 Woodie Awards
Editorial: Lockdown violates student rights
Issue date: 10/30/07 Section: Editorial/Opinion
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10/30/07 - The Wiley Residence Hall director's decision to keep students in their dorm against their will was unwise, unauthorized, unethical and quite possibly illegal.
Barring people from exiting a building is a serious decision that jeopardizes residents' First Amendment rights. This country's legal system believes that one is innocent until proven guilty and there is a long-standing precedent that one can only be held responsible for crimes they have committed, not ones they might commit.
Everyone has a right to celebrate and the university was ready if anything out of the ordinary were to occur on campus after the game. The university assigned about 23 police and security officers to patrol campus and even blocked off the lower part of the campus in anticipation that students would celebrate in the streets.
However, no student should have been denied the right to exit the building. Instead, residence assistants and hall directors should have simply told students to celebrate peacefully if the Red Sox won. Any post-game disturbances from Sunday night were immediately remedied and overall, the celebrations were peaceful.
It would take an extreme act of imminent threat for a hall director to justify locking down a building. In this situation that clearly did not happen. A few hundred students yelling and dancing under the close watch of 23 officers is by no stretch of the imagination an imminent threat.
The hall director's actions have scary consequences. The willingness of a hall director to blatantly ignore policies at upper levels leaves one to wonder what other policies this hall director is ignoring. The Faculty Senate spends weeks debating policies and seeking input from those affected by them. It is not up to any individual simply to ignore these policies.
In situations like this, there is a hope that the Housing and Residential Life administration will launch a full investigation and punish the hall director. There is also a hope that the University Police launch a kidnapping investigation. Looking at the law and the number of witnesses it would appear any prosecutor would have an airtight case.
"Whoever, without lawful authority, forcibly or secretly confines or imprisons another person within this state against his or her will," Rhode Island law reads. It also goes on to say that anyone who violates the law could spend up to 20 years behind bars.
The decision to put the dorm in lockdown possibly breaks the law and the people involved put the entire population of the residence hall in danger if something more serious were to occur on campus.
One would hope that an incident such as this will never occur again at this university.
Barring people from exiting a building is a serious decision that jeopardizes residents' First Amendment rights. This country's legal system believes that one is innocent until proven guilty and there is a long-standing precedent that one can only be held responsible for crimes they have committed, not ones they might commit.
Everyone has a right to celebrate and the university was ready if anything out of the ordinary were to occur on campus after the game. The university assigned about 23 police and security officers to patrol campus and even blocked off the lower part of the campus in anticipation that students would celebrate in the streets.
However, no student should have been denied the right to exit the building. Instead, residence assistants and hall directors should have simply told students to celebrate peacefully if the Red Sox won. Any post-game disturbances from Sunday night were immediately remedied and overall, the celebrations were peaceful.
It would take an extreme act of imminent threat for a hall director to justify locking down a building. In this situation that clearly did not happen. A few hundred students yelling and dancing under the close watch of 23 officers is by no stretch of the imagination an imminent threat.
The hall director's actions have scary consequences. The willingness of a hall director to blatantly ignore policies at upper levels leaves one to wonder what other policies this hall director is ignoring. The Faculty Senate spends weeks debating policies and seeking input from those affected by them. It is not up to any individual simply to ignore these policies.
In situations like this, there is a hope that the Housing and Residential Life administration will launch a full investigation and punish the hall director. There is also a hope that the University Police launch a kidnapping investigation. Looking at the law and the number of witnesses it would appear any prosecutor would have an airtight case.
"Whoever, without lawful authority, forcibly or secretly confines or imprisons another person within this state against his or her will," Rhode Island law reads. It also goes on to say that anyone who violates the law could spend up to 20 years behind bars.
The decision to put the dorm in lockdown possibly breaks the law and the people involved put the entire population of the residence hall in danger if something more serious were to occur on campus.
One would hope that an incident such as this will never occur again at this university.