At least five high school students in Quakertown, located in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, have now been held in police custody for more than 72 hours following last Friday’s anti-ICE protest. As of this writing, authorities have not publicly clarified how many students remain detained, what specific charges they face, or why juveniles are being held for this length of time.
Their alleged offense: defending themselves after a police chief, not in uniform, physically assaulted students. The police assault has provoked mass outrage in the community and throughout the country. A Change.org petition demanding the resignation of Quakertown Police Chief Scott McElree, who was captured on video choking a young female student, has exceeded 7,800 signatures as of this writing.
Those students need to say the words habeous corpus, they need to write those words and mail them to the court, and they need to get their friends and family to press those words onto the courts, the police, and the media, and social media.
If you hold someone, you have to charge them in front of a judge. They will give leeway on a weekend, friday night you might have to wait until monday morning which is bad enough. But going through a work day that the court is in session without honoring habeous corpus is a violation of the Bill of Rights, and should get the case dismissed if they do try to file charges.
This chief needs to be fired, and charged. He sounds like he’s refusing to honor the Bill of Rights out of a personal grudge after assaulting them when he was off duty. Clown show.
Several states have laws where you can be held for X period of time without being formally charged. It sounds like they’ve exceeded that limit in this case.