SPECIAL FROM THE ADVERTISER OF GRANDFALLS-WINDSOR

Mary Beth Harshbarger showed no emotion as a Provincial Court judge in Grand Falls-Windsor told her she would not be granted bail.

The 45-year-old resident of Meshoppen, will appear in court again on Tuesday, May 25.

She was extradited earlier this week from the United States and brought to Newfoundland to answer the charge of criminal negligence causing death with use of a firearm.

The charges stem from her allegedly shooting her husband Mark, 42, while the couple was hunting near Buchans Junction.

Mark Harshbarger died Sept. 14, 2006 after he and Mary Beth brought their young son and daughter on a trip to Buchans Junction, where the couple intended to hunt for black bear. The shooting happened in the early evening; Mark Harshbarger had not been wearing hunter's orange but dark clothing.

Times-Shamrock Writer

A former Tunkhannock Area High School student is accusing school and Wyoming County law enforcement officials of violating her privacy rights by seizing and searching her cell phone and punishing her for storing nude and semi-nude photos of herself on the device.

The woman, who was a 17-year-old senior at the time, contends in a civil rights suit filed Thursday that the intimate photos were intended to be viewed "only by herself and, perhaps, her longtime boyfriend." She is seeking unspecified damages and the destruction of all electronic and hard copies of the photos.

The woman, now 19 and living in Hughesville, is identified only by her initials - N.N. - in the complaint filed in U.S. District Court by the Philadelphia law firm Cozen O'Connor and the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.

"I was absolutely horrified to learn that school officials, men in (the district attorney's) office and police had seen naked pictures of me," the woman, who graduated in 2009, said in a statement released by the ACLU. "Those pictures were extremely private and not meant for anyone else's eyes. What they did is the equivalent of spying on me through my bedroom window."

The woman was a schoolmate of three girls who sued when they were threatened with prosecution by former District Attorney George Skumanick after photos of them in various states of undress were circulated among Tunkhannock Area students in 2008. In April, a federal judge barred prosecutors from pursuing charges in the "sexting" case.

According to the lawsuit:

On Jan. 23, 2009, a teacher confiscated the high school student's cell phone because she was using it on school grounds, in violation of school policy.

Later that day, she was called to Principal Gregory Ellsworth's office. Mr. Ellsworth told her the phone had been turned over to law enforcement after he went through its contents and found "explicit" photos stored in its memory.

The photos, which were not visible on the phone's screen and required multiple steps to locate, were never circulated to other students, the suit stated. In most of the images, the student appeared fully covered, although several showed her naked breasts and one indistinctly showed her pubic area.

The student was given and served a three day out-of-school suspension. According to the district's student handbook, the first offense for cell phone misuse is a 90-minute Saturday detention and the confiscation of the phone for the rest of the day.

A few days later, the student and her mother met with David Ide, chief county detective in the district attorney's office, who told them he had seen the photos and sent the phone to a crime lab in Delaware.

The suit alleges that when the mother stepped away, Detective Ide told the student it was a shame she had not waited until after her 18th birthday in April 2009 because, instead of getting into trouble, she could have submitted the photos to Playboy magazine. He suggested the student contact him, winking as he said, "I'll get you your phone back," according to the complaint.

Shortly after, the student and her mother received a letter from Mr. Skumanick threatening felony child pornography charges if the student did not complete a five-week re-education course on sexual violence and victimization. The student paid a fee of about $100 and took the course to avoid prosecution.

The lawsuit alleges the search of the phone and the punishment meted out to the student violated her rights under the First and Fourth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and the Pennsylvania constitution.

Tunkhannock Area School District, Mr. Ellsworth, Mr. Skumanick and Detective Ide are named as defendants, along with the county, current District Attorney Jeff Mitchell and 10 unidentified government officials or private individuals who possess copies of the photos.

Mr. Mitchell declined to comment, saying he had not seen the complaint. School district Superintendent Michael Healey said the district would have nothing to say until its solicitor, Frank Tunis, "has had an opportunity to review the document."

Witold Walczak, ACLU legal director and one of the former student's lawyers, said students "do not lose their privacy rights at the schoolhouse door."

"School administrators have no more right to look through personal photographs stored on a student's cell phone than they have the right to rummage through her purse, read her diary and mail, or view her family photo album," he said.

Co-counsel Ilan Rosenberg of Cozen O'Connor declined to release the woman's name. Although she is now an adult, the incident happened when she was a minor, he said, and local federal court rules require only initials to be used in matters involving a minor child.

In school assemblies after the "sexting" case arose in November 2008, Mr. Healey warned students that confiscated cell phones would be checked for inappropriate images, according to Times-Tribune accounts of the meetings.

Mr. Rosenberg said that warning was not part of the school's published policy on cell phones at the time his client's phone was confiscated. Regardless, he said, school officials had no "reasonable suspicion" to check the stored images on the phone.

"It's like looking through a window because the window is there," he said. He then amended the analogy: "It's like opening a window, opening the blinds and looking through the window because the window is there."