High school vice principal says students who made fun of him on social media guilty under CFAA, RICO
Besides suing students for making fun of him it appears that drunk driving is another of Mr Matot’s pastimes. http://mugshots.com/Current-Events/ADAM-MATOT.61256033.html Adam Matot, 42, was arrested by the Salem Police in Oregon on June 14, 2013 for suspicion of drunken driving. According to news reports, police received a call about a crash at about 8:30 pm. Matot reportedly rear-ended another vehicle that was slowing down to turn into a Circle K parking lot. Matot is reported to have given the other driver his insurance card but drove away when police were called. Several students apparently heard the crash and saw Matot next to the crash scene. He was subsequently arrested at his home and charged with driving under the influence. Matot is an assistant principal at Judson Middle School.
Well he has guaranteed he won’t be able to lead effectively anymore since everyone in the school will be laughing behind his back.
One has to wonder at the quality of his legal representation to even have filed suit trying to make the claims he did.
Where do you find such vacuous lawyers? Or is this really typical of modern law practice: File on anything, no matter how specious since the client is paying by the minute.
Why not file suit for libel and impersonation?
Yeah, the nature of authority is insanity. And why wasn’t this guy fired yesterday.
Given the cost of law school, and the legal job market, probably standing on street corners with ‘will litigate for food’ and ‘brother can you spare a tort?’ signs scrawled in sharpie on their diplomas…
There might be something a bit better than garden-variety insanity in this case: nobody goes into middle school education (either from the outside, or rising to admin internally) if they can’t take a few dubiously adolescent kids being dickheads to them from time to time. It’s just not something you do. So, if he suddenly goes full-metal-psycho and attempts to sling a grab bag of random felony charges, there may be something a… little tense… in his head that just snapped. The overall sense of ferocious-grasping-at-control-already-lost goes well with the police report concerning bad judgement and booze.
I don’t know if they’ll find cause to fire him; but somebody’s career is going nowhere from now on.
heh. It’s fun to kid,
But my curiosity was piqued so I looked up the rates.
According to the WSJ The 2012 unemployment rate for lawyers was 1.4%. Basically the field of litigators enjoys full employment.
This guy’s like such a spazz, to make a federal case out of these things.
I think the court should have awarded the kids legal fees, plus $20 just to insult the guy.
That’s the rate of lawyers who lost their jobs and are now collecting unemployment checks. The employment rate for law school graduates in the class of '12 as of February 2013 was 84.7%. (source) Elsewhere (can’t find it at the moment) I’ve read that fully 1/3 of law school graduates in recent years have resorted to finding employment in fields other than law.
Even this data significantly over-estimates the (law-related) employment prospects for lawyers. There are over 200 law schools in the US. Take a look at the most recent employment data for graduates of Georgetown Law, the 14th best law school in the country. Only 75% of them are employed in positions that require a law degree. But even that overestimates the law market, because over 10% of those counted as employed are actually being paid (and not paid very much) by the law school to “volunteer” somewhere: discount them and less than 68% of grads have actually found an employer that actually wants to pay them to be lawyer. And remember, this is at one of the best law schools in the country.
Yeah, this. While it’s fun to laugh at the crazy principal, is there actually any law against impersonating a person online in social media? Identity theft is the closest thing I can think of. But without seeing the accounts in question, it’s hard to say if it was believable that it was actually his account or not (that is, if it was obviously a parody account or not). There’s a difference between “making fun of somebody on social media” and “pretending to be somebody on social media in an attempt to ruin their reputation”, but it’s hard to tell what this case represents, based on the limited information. So the actual things he sued them with are silly, but I wonder if there isn’t something less crazy that he could have tried.
Here is a Canadian case: http://metronews.ca/news/ottawa/360297/mambo-restaurant-co-owner-found-guilty-in-criminal-defamatory-libel-case/ that ended with a criminal conviction. But the woman is appealing.
Whether or not you find the woman appealing should be totally immaterial in this case, frankly I find the inclu…oh wait, ok, never mind.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
