Liberty Counsel Petitions U.S. Supreme Court to Hear School Graduation Free Speech Case
The Colorado valedictorian who was denied her diploma until she wrote a an apology for mentioning Jesus in her graduation speech is asking the United States Supreme Court to hear her case.
Liberty Council, has filed a Petition for Writ Certiorari at the United States Supreme Court on behalf of Erica Corder, a high school graduate with a 4.0 GPA who in May 2006 was denied her diploma until she issued a publically disseminated, coerced, written apology for presenting a thirty-second valedictory speech that included a religious reference.
Mathew Staver, Founder of Liberty Counsel and Dean of Liberty University School of Law said in a statement, “A valedictorian’s speech is not government speech. Everyone knows that a valedictorian earned the high GPA and understands the speech belongs to the student. It is reprehensible that the school district threatened to withhold Erica Corder’s diploma, merely because a few sentences of her 30-second speech included references to God.”
The then, Lewis-Palmer High School in Monument, Colorado, Principal Mark Brewer, demanded Corder write: “I realize that, had I asked ahead of time, I would not have been allowed to say what I did.” Brewer then blasted out the message in an e-mail to the entire high school community. Soon after, Erica received her diploma.
Corder complied with the principal’s demand for an apology out of fear that the school would withhold her diploma, put disciplinary notes in her file, all actions that she feared would prevent her from becoming a school teacher.
Corder sued the school, but the district court ruled that her speech was “school-sponsored,” and thus the coerced apology was not improper. In an appeal, (Corder v. Lewis Palmer Sch. Dist. No. 38, No. 08-1293 (10th Cir. May 29, 2009), the Tenth Circuit Court agreed
The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals undermines the decision in the case of Adler v. Duval County School Board, (argued and won by Liberty Counsel after an 8½-year battle against the ACLU), in which the entire panel of 12 judges of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals found that a policy whereby students select the content of their messages is student speech and not school-sponsored speech, resulting in the fact that religious viewpoints of students are protected by the First Amendment.
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- Lousiana Federal Court Says Town Violated Christian’s Free Speech Rights
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