BIRMINGHAM, ala. — Some facts of the case aren’t in dispute: A teacher’s aide asked a 14-year-old girl to go into a middle school bathroom as bait so a 16-year-old eighth-grader with a history of sexual harassment could be caught trying to have sex with her and disciplined.
The scheme backfired. The girl was sexually assaulted in a bathroom stall, evidence shows.
Why the plan was carried out and who knew about it are at the heart of a court fight pitting the Obama administration and groups that advocate against sexual violence versus a north Alabama school district that says its administrators aren’t to blame for the 2010 attack.
The Justice Department and 33 private organizations have asked the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a lower court’s decision to dismiss a federal lawsuit filed by the girl’s father against the Madison County School Board, four school workers and the boy.
They contend that U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Putnam should have let the lawsuit move forward, arguing he erred when ruling that Sparkman Middle School officials didn’t have sufficient warning the boy might pose a threat.
Putnam didn’t endorse the idea of using a girl as bait for a predator but said allowing her to be put in such a position wasn’t bad enough for the lawsuit to continue.
“Although it was foolish to send (the girl) to meet (the boy), the court cannot say that it was ‘extreme and outrageous.’ The scheme to catch (the boy) ended horribly and tragically, but the idea of using (the girl) to catch (the boy) ‘in the act,’ however foolish, was not so extreme or outrageous as ‘to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in a civilized society,'” Putnam wrote in an opinion in July 2013 in the lawsuit filed under the federal Title IX law which in part prohibits sexual harassment in schools.
The Justice Department last month sided with the plaintiff’s position that school administrators knew of the plan and should have realized the boy was a threat.
The Women’s Law Project and 32 other groups agreed.
