http://abcnews.go.com/WN/story?id=3976074&page=1


Well it is incredibly TASTELESS but one of the students claims it was a free speech act so I look to see WHAT he was trying to "say".

From the article:
"However, Powers said that Penn State, after talking with one of the students involved, had no plans to discipline the students, citing freedom of speech protections in the Constitution....In the interview, which the station WSLS posted on its Web site, the unnamed student said, "It's not that it was funny, it's that we are notorious and infamous in the state college and very popular, so we have to do things that push the envelope just for shock value."

Free speech is NOT an ABSOLUTE right. The cliched example is that you don't have a right to yell "fire" in a crowded theater. However, as I have said numerous times no one has a right to go through life unoffended.

Yet here I can discern ABSOLUTELY NO VALID FREE SPEECH objective. If they were expressing a political view for example this would be easy and they would be within their rights. But here they just say they wanted to shock people.

This borders on Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress which in most jurisdictions is a cause of action (they could be sued for it). Their goal was not to convey a message. Instead it appears their goal (if they had one) was SOLELY to gain attention. As the article says, they were "attention whores". But they had to know that if they were successful in gaining attention they were going to harm a lot of people namely the relatives of the dead.

Can anybody out there tell me WHY they shouldn't be sued out of financial existence???

And if this IS free speech would it have been ok if they had showed up at the dead students' funerals in this garb???