Victory: Student Charged After Recording His Own Bullies Will No Longer Have Case Pursued By District Attorney | Ben Swann Truth In Media

Victory: Student Charged After Recording His Own Bullies Will No Longer Have Case Pursued By District Attorney | Ben Swann Truth In Media



Our special education director threatened a family that if they brought a tape recorder to an IEP meeting he would cancel it.  In Missouri you can secretly tape record meetings.  



10 days after Benswann.com was the first media in the nation to report the case of Christian Stanfield, the 15 year old Pennsylvania sophomore who was convicted of disorderly conduct for recording bullies, we have now learned of a new twist in the case.
As we were first to report, Stanfield used his school approved iPad to record a 7 minute incident where bullies mocked and used incredibly vulgar language to berate him during a special education math class. Stanfield says this kind of bullying has gone on throughout the entire school year and made the recording to prove to his mother that the bullying was truly happening. CThe 15 year-old presented that audio recording to his mother Shea Love who made a transcript of the audio. The next morning, Love called the Dean of Students at South Fayette High School and explained what had happened to Christian.
Instead of the bullies being prosecuted, a local police Lieutenant told Love that her son could face charges of wiretapping which is a felony crime. Christian was not charged with wiretapping after all but on Wednesday, March 19, District Judge Maureen McGraw-Desmet stated that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was charging Christian Stanfield with disorderly conduct. Stanfield never entered a plea, but McGraw-Desmet found him guilty and ordered that he pay a fine.
Stanfield’s mother told Benswann.com exclusively, “Christian chose the most responsible route possible for a student who felt he had no power and no voice in order to change the negative environment that he was forced to be in every day. If we are ever going to change the culture of violence in our schools, we need to look at Christian’s actions not criminally, but rather as a profound cultural step in the right direction for kids who don’t feel they are being heard.”
Stanfield had announced that he and his attorney would file an appeal to that ruling but his fight may already be coming to an end. Today, Benswann.com has been told by Stanfield’s attorney that the District Attorney will allow the appeal to go forward but will no longer pursue this case. Stanfield’s attorney says that information is just coming in and he needs time to study exactly what this means for Christian.

Since our stories on this issue first broke, the response has been huge. The high school’s principal has deleted his twitter profile, at a recent school board meeting parents turned out to defend Christian, and now national and international media are finally covering the story including Fox News, RT America, and the Daily Mail UK.
Shea Love, Christian’s mother sent this message to Benswann.com today:
“Ben Swann and Priscilla Jones!!! This is mom of Christian True Stanfield. Without you covering this story and capturing the heart of a nation, we would not have been victorious!
God bless you both!
God bless the nation that has supported us!
This is just step one.
I will always hold a place for you both near and dear to my heart!
Thank you so much!
You have change ours lives forever!!!!”
The reporter who broke the story for Benswann.com, Priscilla Jones tells Ben Swann she is “proud to be a part of a news organization that is working to tell these kinds of stories and where Humanity is truly greater than Politics.”

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