A couple of weeks back, I wrote about two Seventh Graders in McMinnville, Oregon, who found themselves facing multiple counts of felony sexual abuse, later reduced to sexual harrassment and sexual assault, for having been caught “butt-swatting” – apparently a form of greeting among pupils of both sexes that had become popular every “Butt-Swat Friday”.

The judge, perhaps the last sane man in the McMinnville justice system, has now dismissed all the charges:

Four girls listed as victims by the prosecutors had asked the judge to drop the charges against Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison.
Yamhill County Judge John Collins did so on Monday, saying it was in the “interest of justice…”
The News-Register newspaper of McMinnville reported that a “civil compromise” reached by prosecutors and the defense called for both boys to apologize, to pay each of the four girls $250 and to complete a “boundaries education” program.

The guys who need the “boundaries education” program are the District Attorney, Bradley Berry, who originally was intent on getting the Seventh Graders registered for life as sex offenders; the McMinnville Police Officer Marshall Roache, who read the boys their Miranda rights in the principal’s office and led them away to spend five days in juvenile jail; and the Vice-Principal Steve Tillery, who started this whole thing. The only people guilty of “abuse” are the justice, law enforcement and education officials who determined to destroy these kids’ lives and who forced two very ordinary families to spend over $20,000 resisting the “harrassment” of the state.

I concluded my original column on the subject as follows:

The law is an ass, wrote Dickens, and so it seems. A world that requires handcuffs and judges and district attorneys for what took place that Friday in February is not just a failed education system but an entire society that’s losing any sense of proportion.

To require law enforcement to police every routine area of social interaction is to render civilized life impossible and to make more and more citizens the arbitrary victims of a kind of Totalitarianism Lite.