Boy’s arrest for burping in school upheld by court

A federal appeals court has upheld the petty misdemeanour arrest of a New Mexico student accused of repeatedly disrupting his middleschool class with loud burps.

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the officer and educators named in the lawsuit were entitled to immunity, and that the arrest was justified under a New Mexico law that prohibits anyone from interfering in the education process.

The student was a seventhgrader at Albuquerque’s Cleveland Middle School at the time of the May 2011 arrest. He is not named in court documents.

His mother, who also isn’t named, filed the lawsuit against the then 13-year-old’s principals and the police officer who escorted him to his patrol car before patting him down, handcuffing him and taking him to a juvenile detention centre.

The boy was held for an hour before his mother arrived. She argued that the arrest was unlawful and resulted in excessive force.

According to the school, the boy was in a physical education class when his teacher said he began making other students laugh with fake burps.

The teacher sent him to the hallway, where he continued burping and leaning into the entranceway to the classroom so the other students could hear him. That’s when Officer Arthur Acosta, assigned to the middle school as its resource officer, was called to the hallway, according to court documents.

The boy disputed the version of events provided to Acosta by his teacher before the officer led him away from the classroom, and took him first to the school’s administrative office and then the juvenile detention centre.

The boy was suspended for the remainder of the school year.

The appeals court also dismissed a separate complaint brought by the boy’s mother, stemming from a school official’s decision to search the boy after the burp-related arrest.

The court found that the search did not violate the boy’s constitutional rights.