When Homework Becomes a Noose-sance

Posted on July 30, 2008
Filed Under News, The Daily Prereq | By Mike Dang

Sometimes a noose found hanging somewhere on campus screams “hate crime!” but sometimes it just means “I hate homework.” According to The Morning Sun, prosecutors have decided not to charge a 28-year-old Central Michigan University engineering student for hanging four nooses using flexible gas lines in a laboratory on campus last year. An investigation into the incident showed no evidence that the hanging nooses were meant to cause “ethnic intimidation,” but instead represented that the student would rather hang himself than continue working on a difficult assignment.

The painstaking investigation took 8 months to complete and involved the CMU police, the Michigan State Police Computer Crimes Unit, and FBI agents from both Quantico, Va. and Bay City. To make sure that the hanging nooses were not symbols of hate, the state computer crimes unit checked out the student’s personal computer to see if he visited any racially-associated Web sites. FBI officials did an “exhaustive forensic examination” of the computer, meaning they reviewed more than 100,000 web images and personal documents both before the incident and in the days following. Web sites, e-mails, created documents — all of these were checked out to create a window into the student’s state of mind before investigators determined that the incident lacked racial enmity. The next time this student wants to complain about an assignment, maybe he should do it in a way that won’t generate fear or bring up one of the darkest chapters of American history.

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