N.C. v. State
| Decision Date | 29 May 2020 |
| Docket Number | CR-17-1134 |
| Citation | 309 So.3d 629 |
| Parties | N.C. v. STATE of Alabama |
| Court | Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals |
Robert Theodore Ray, Fort Payne, for appellant.
Steve Marshall, atty. gen., and Yvonne A.H. Saxon, asst. atty. gen., for appellee.
(C. 4.) After holding a hearing on the petition, the juvenile court found the charge in the petition to be true, adjudicated N.C. delinquent, and placed him on probation for a period of six months. (C. 18-19.)
The evidence presented to the juvenile court established the following: Sometime in the evening on Friday, March 2, 2018, N.C., a 13-year-old student in the seventh grade at Jacksonville High School,1 was engaged in a private conversation on Instagram, a social-media platform, with L.H., a friend who lived somewhere in Georgia. During that private conversation, N.C. joked with L.H. because L.H. was losing "followers" to her Instagram account. N.C. then offered to "cheat" for L.H. by making new, fake Instagram accounts and having those fake accounts follow L.H.’s account. L.H. rejected N.C.’s offer.
Because L.H. had apparently asked her Instagram followers to pose questions to her and told them that she would post those questions to her Instagram account, N.C. told L.H. that he had a question for her and asked her to post it to her account. L.H. responded, "No." N.C. wrote back, "That's it." (R. 95.) When L.H. asked N.C. what he meant, N.C. sent her an image of the Columbine gunmen in what appears to be a school cafeteria.2 N.C. then deleted the image from his private conversation with L.H.
When L.H. asked N.C. what the image meant, N.C. explained that it was only a joke. N.C. and L.H. then had the following exchange:
(N.C.’s Exhibit 3 (punctuation as it appears in the original).) N.C. explained to L.H. that he did not mean for the image to be taken seriously, apologized for posting the image, begged for mercy, and pleaded that he did not want to be arrested. But L.H. continued to tell N.C. that she was under a lot of "pressure" and that she had to tell someone because "[i]t was too much." (Id. ) When N.C. asked L.H. who she had told about the image, L.H. responded, (Id. )
Later, L.H. added other people to the conversation to give N.C. an opportunity to "explain" what he meant by the image he posted. (Id. ) N.C. told the people who were added to the conversation the following:
(N.C.’s Exhibit 3 (grammar, punctuation, and spelling as it appears in the original).)
After an exchange with the people that L.H. added to the conversation, N.C. again explained: (Id. ) One person responded to N.C.: "We know that." (Id. ) Another person in the conversation told N.C. that she would "see [him] in court buddy [waving-hand emoji3 ]." (Id. ) Another person wrote: (Id. ) After N.C. pleaded with the group that he did not want to go to "death row," L.H. told N.C. that minors could not go to death row and that, even so, he "only made a threat." (Id. ) N.C. again assured L.H. (and the other people L.H. had invited into the conversation) that "[i]t wasn't meant like that," and L.H. responded, "We know, but changes cannot be made." (Id. )
On Sunday, March 4, 2018, at around 10:30 p.m., two days after his private conversation with L.H., N.C.’s mother brought N.C. to the Jacksonville Police Department to speak with a police officer because word had spread about the image N.C. had posted in his private conversation with L.H. While there, N.C. spoke with Jason Campbell, an investigator with the Jacksonville Police Department. According to Inv. Campbell, N.C.’s mother brought N.C. to the police department "before [the police] got too far into [their] investigation." (R. 9-10.) Before asking N.C. any questions, Inv. Campbell advised N.C. of his juvenile Miranda rights. N.C. waived those rights and spoke with Inv. Campbell.4
During that conversation, Inv. Campbell told N.C. that "there's a lot circulating right now about a picture supposedly you might have sent out of the Columbine school shooter." (N.C.’s Exhibit 1, p. 2.) N.C. told Inv. Campbell that he was "talking with a girl from Georgia" on Instagram and that he sent her the picture "thinking she would take it as a joke" because he was "trying to make [her] laugh." (N.C.’s Exhibit 1, pp. 6-7.) N.C. explained to Inv. Campbell that "everyone was joking about it last year," and that he "thought it would really be nothing and she would take it as a joking way, but, apparently, she thought that [he] was going to do something." (N.C.’s Exhibit 1, p. 5.) N.C. told Inv. Campbell that he was "not in possession of guns or nothing" and that he "realized it was a huge mistake." (Id. ) N.C. also told Inv. Campbell that some of the girls who were in the conversation "have been messing with [him] since last year"--that "they've been bullying and all that." (N.C.’s Exhibit 1, p. 9.) N.C. also explained that he had no ill will toward anyone and that he had never thought of harming anyone. (Id. at 11.)
Additionally, N.C.’s mother explained to Inv. Campbell that one of the girls who was in the group chat with N.C. "started a group chat that says, ‘Stay safe, folks, because [N.C.]--’ This girl told--After [N.C.] sent that picture, she told everybody that [N.C.] was going to shoot up the school, and from there, it just exploded." (N.C.’s Exhibit 1, p. 12.)
At the hearing on N.C.’s petition, Inv. Campbell testified about his investigation into N.C.’s conversation with L.H. According to Inv. Campbell, the police department received "calls from the community, concerned citizens were calling the police department at an alarming rate" and "[e]ven some parents came to the police department wanting [them] to demand some action on this." (R. 8.) Inv. Campbell explained that the outcry concerned a post on a social-media account--namely, that N.C. had posted in a conversation a picture "of the Columbine shooter in the school during the shooting of the school." (R. 9.) Inv. Campbell then testified about N.C.’s mother bringing N.C. to the police department and that he received their permission to search N.C.’s house. (R. 28.) Inv. Campbell said that the police found nothing of interest at N.C.’s house. (R. 28.)
Inv. Campbell further testified that they had contacted the administration at N.C.’s school and "had planned on having off-duty officers stay over from the third shift to be in the schools." (R. 31.) He also explained that they were going to have "some first shift guys to actually come in to help [them] to make sure that [they] didn't let [N.C.] get to the school that morning, Monday morning, and pick him up for questioning." (R. 32.) However, Inv. Campbell said that none of that was necessary after N.C.’s mother brought him to the police. (R. 32.)
On cross-examination, Inv. Campbell admitted that he did not "know who else put [the picture] on social media, but it got out in social media like wildfire." (R. 37.) Inv. Campbell also explained that, although N.C. posted the picture in a private conversation with L.H., Inv. Campbell never directly spoke with L.H. (R. 39.) When pressed about what precise threat N.C. had made, Inv. Campbell testified that it was that N.C. was going to "shoot up the school." (R. 41.) However, Inv. Campbell testified that he did not know who N.C. was upset with or whether the threat that N.C. made was directed at L.H.’s school in Georgia or some other school; he did not "know what school [N.C.]...
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