Student cleared in stolen AirPods case after 3-year ticket battle
Amara Harris was issued a $120 ticket after being accused of stealing another high school student's ear buds in 2019.
For 20-year-old Amara Harris, it was a matter of principle. For more than three and a half years, she stood her ground, refusing to pay a $120 ticket issued to her by police who charged her with having stolen a classmate’s AirPods at Naperville North High School in suburban Chicago.
Harris never deviated from her initial account of what happened, saying she’d simply picked up the wrong AirPods and had never meant to steal them from another student. On Thursday, a six-person jury in DuPage County, Ill., ruled that she had not violated Naperville's theft ordinance and cleared her of having to pay the ticket, ProPublica reported.
Serial number presented as evidence
A lawyer for the prosecution noted during trial that the serial number on the AirPods found in Harris’s possession matched those belonging to the student who accused her of stealing them. After getting the AirPods back, that student later noticed they had been digitally labeled “Amara's AirPods.” City prosecutor Joseph Solon Jr. said that showed Harris had been “caught with her hand in the cookie jar.”
‘I didn’t steal them’
“I didn’t steal them, so there was no need for me to pay a fine,” Harris, who is now attending Spelman College in Georgia, testified Wednesday, adding, “I didn’t take the AirPods.”
On Wednesday, she testified that she lost her AirPods while she was at school one morning and retraced her movements in an attempt to find them, the Chicago Tribune reported. After she discovered a pair in the school commons that she believed were the missing AirPods, she unsuccessfully tried to pair them with her phone, she told the jury. Later, however, she was able to pair them and never received a notification telling her they were not hers.
The prosecution did not call any technical experts as witnesses.
If the jury had found she knowingly took the AirPods and found her liable in the case, Harris would have faced a maximum penalty on the theft charge of $500 and a $100 court fee.
Student tickets
Juan Leon, the school police officer who issued Harris the $120 ticket, also testified in the case, telling jurors he had decided to ticket her after her mother refused to discuss the possibility of downgrading the offense to a “station adjustment,” which could have entailed requiring Harris to perform community service.
ProPublica conducted an investigation of municipal fines handed down to Illinois students, finding that 12,000 had been issued over a nearly three-year period and that Black students were nearly five times more likely than white students to receive them.
‘Justice is done’
After the judge read the jury’s decision in the courtroom, an elated Harris hugged her mother and grandmother, the Chicago Tribune reported.
“Justice is done,” Harris said.
