By msnbc.com staff and news service reports
A burp in class was enough to get an Albuquerque?13-year-old handcuffed, arrested and hauled off to Juvenile Detention Center last year, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday.
The school principal, a teacher and a police officer were named in the suit that claimed they used excessive force and violated the boy?s civil rights with an unlawful arrest and unlawful strip search during two incidents involving the child.
The Albuquerque Journal was first to report the story.
The boy was transported without his parents being notified in May after he "burped audibly" in PE class and his teacher called a school resource officer to complain he was disrupting her class. The lawsuit also details a separate Nov. 8 incident when the same student was forced to strip down to his underwear while five adults watched as he was accused of selling marijuana to another student.
The boy was never charged.
"Criminalizing of the burping of a thirteen-year-old boy serves no governmental purpose," the lawsuit said. "Burping is not a serious disruption, a threat of danger was never an issue ?"
The suit was one of two filed Wednesday by civil rights attorney Shannon Kennedy, who says she has been fighting the district and police for years over the use of force with problem children. In the other case, the parents of a 7-year-old boy with autism accuse an Albuquerque police officer of unlawful arrest for handcuffing the boy to a chair after he became agitated in class.
New Mexico law prohibits officers and school officials from restraining children under 11.
The suits come one year after the same attorney settled a class action lawsuit against the district that was prompted by the arrest of a girl who Kennedy said "didn't want to sit by the stinky boy in class." And Kennedy says she has a number of other cases she is preparing over treatment of students in Albuquerque by school officials, school police, city police and sheriff's officers.
"I am trying to get all the stake holders in a room to get people properly trained to prevent this from happening," Kennedy said.
Kennedy said the problem lies with the schools more than with the city police department.
"It lands in the lap of the principal. There are good schools and bad schools. The principals ... who are handling their schools properly don't need to have children arrested. It's ridiculous."
A spokesman for Albuquerque Public Schools did not immediately return calls and emails seeking comment on Thursday. A spokeswoman for the police department said the department does not comment on pending litigation.
One school board member, Lorenzo Garcia, said he had not seen and could not comment on the lawsuits, but he did say he was concerned about what appeared to be schools getting stuck on a "zero tolerance policy."
"Really, in my opinion, this really increases the whole idea of the schools-to-prison pipeline," he said.
?The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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