Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania installed webcam spying software on laptops provided to students.

A family suing the Lower Merion School district for spying on students and their families at home using webcams on the district’s notebook computers will not pursue a class action damages according to Associated Press and Philadelphia Inquirer. Lawyer, Mark Haltzman, says Blake Robbins will seek class action status only for purposes of obtaining an injunction that to correct and prevent the school district’s abuses.

While it’s disgusting that the school district’s program to invade the privacy of students even got beyond the brainstorming stage, the school administrators that implemented this obnoxious scheme, would end up be insulated from paying the price by tax payers. So, it’s understandable that even parents and community members who are shocked at the school’s misconduct do oppose class action damages.

Mr. Haltzman stated, “we now realize that each person was damaged so uniquely that it wouldn’t be appropriate to seek damages as a class-action.” Strategically this may make it easier for the district and the student’s family to settle. At the same time, it may not work out that this saves the district financial consequences. Without a class action award or settlement each individual victim of the school’s privacy invasions may pursue an individual suit. That could be more costly in the long run.

The real solution was for the school district to consider the impact of every policy and action on the rights of citizens. As government run schools are are pervasive in the private lives of children and families they should be held to a privacy standard at least as high as the police–probably much higher.

Pope Benedict XVI. Photo by Rvin88.

“In his most thorough admission of the church’s guilt in the clerical sex abuse scandal, Pope Benedict XVI said Tuesday the greatest persecution of the institution ‘is born from the sins within the church,’ and not from a campaign by outsiders,” according to this AP article carried by the Chicago Tribune. He went on to admit, “the church needs to profoundly relearn penitence, accept purification, learn forgiveness but also justice.”

Delivered with all the anemic ambiguity of a church politician the statement still signifies some openness to restitution. While this lip service is a necessary step the concrete measure, removing child molesters and those who protected them from their offices, still hasn’t been accomplished.

According to AP, “The abuse cases of two priests in Arizona have cast further doubt on the Catholic church’s insistence that Pope Benedict XVI played no role in shielding pedophiles before he became pope. Documents reviewed by The Associated Press show that as a Vatican cardinal, the future pope took over the abuse case of the Rev. Michael Teta of Tucson, Arizona, then let it languish at the Vatican for years despite repeated pleas from the bishop for the man to be removed from the priesthood. In another Tucson case, that of Msgr. Robert Trupia,” files held no sign  that Ratzinger paid any attention “to a letter from Bishop Manuel Moreno calling Trupia ‘a major risk factor to the children, adolescents and adults that he many have contact with.’”

Meanwhile the New York Times let’s us know about the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who in 1974 “was sent to retire” in Boulder Junction, WI, “after victims of sexual abuse demanded he be removed from work at a school for the deaf near Milwaukee.” However, his abuse of children may have continued. “Recent interviews with people who live in the area and Roman Catholic Church documents” suggest that Murphy, “who is accused of molesting as many as 200 boys at the school near Milwaukee, also used his family’s lakefront cottage as a lure in his sexual advances, bringing youths from the school into his home beginning at least in the early 1960s. The Archdiocese of Milwaukee, said that Father Murphy was placed on certain restrictions upon leaving Milwaukee that included not having any contact with children and that ‘he ignored the restrictions.’”

“The bankruptcy trustee for defunct law firm Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler contends the government has once again overstepped its bounds by trying to control additional assets that belonged to convicted fraudster Scott Rothstein. On Monday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office filed a motion seeking a protective order be entered to preserve new assets, including four Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler bank accounts at TD Bank containing almost $120,000 and ‘all property, other than ‘funds’ voluntarily turned over to the government since news broke in late October that Rothstein was running a settlement scheme out of his law firm. But trustee Herbert Stettin argued that the government could not lay claim to assets that don’t belong to Rothstein and were not included for forfeiture in the original information, calling the motion ‘particularly egregious,’” according to Daily Business Review.

An AP article in the New York Times  reads “The head of a Roman Catholic order that specialized in the treatment of pedophile priests visited with then-Pope Paul VI nearly 50 years ago and followed up with a letter recommending the removal of pedophile priests from ministry, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday.” It “shows that the Vatican knew, or should have known, about clergy abuse in the U.S. decades ago, said Anthony DeMarco, a plaintiff attorney in Los Angeles who provided the letter. The accusation comes as plaintiffs in Kentucky are attempting to sue the Vatican for negligence for allegedly failing to alert police or the public about priests who molested children.”

Separately, AP writes, “Lawyers in a Florida clergy sex abuse case say the Vatican office then headed by Pope Benedict XVI failed to remove an alleged pedophile from the priesthood for years, even when the priest himself asked to be defrocked. Attorney Jessica Arbour, who represents an alleged victim of the Rev. Ernesto Garcia-Rubio in a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Miami, also said Wednesday that the Vatican instructed church officials in Florida to shelter the priest after he was forced to leave Cuba. The lawsuit was filed last year, but the lawyers released more details of the Garcia-Rubio case amid questions about the Roman Catholic church’s response to European sexual abuse allegations, and about the role of Benedict as an archbishop in his native Germany and then as head of a Vatican office.”

Wall Street Journal law blogger Ashby Jones correctly notes that the Pope’s Benedict’s immunity as the head of state of the Holy See (Vatican City) will likely shield him from any legal process issued in the U.S.