BOSTON – A $10 marijuana cookie is at the center of a case due to go before the highest court in Massachusetts.

The court is being asked to decide whether a judge abused his discretion by reinstating a high school student who was expelled after another student identified him as the supplier of the cookie.

School administrators argue that the judge improperly stepped into a school disciplinary matter that should have been left to them.

But the boy’s attorneys say school administrators punished him because, on the advice of his father and a lawyer, he refused to talk to them about what happened. They are asking the court to determine whether school administrators should be allowed to draw a negative inference from a student’s silence during a disciplinary hearing.

The Supreme Judicial Court is scheduled to hear arguments in the case today.

The case began in March 2010 when a student at Weston High School went to the school nurse’s office after he appeared “very high,” according to school administrators. Another student who gave him the cookie said he bought it for $10 from a third student, referred to in court papers as “Robert Doe,” a 17-year-old junior.

A Weston police officer, the school resource officer, went to Doe’s house that afternoon and asked his father to speak to him. The boy’s father declined.

During a meeting in the principal’s office the next day, the boy refused to answer any questions about the cookie or his alleged involvement.

The boy was advised not to talk because the same police officer was present for that meeting and later meetings, said one of his attorneys, Richard Hayes.

“This was a potential criminal setting,” Hayes said. “They are saying, ‘Oh, that’s nonsense, this is a school matter.’ Then why is a cop there taking notes in every meeting?”

“What they are trying to say is, ‘Well, he wouldn’t talk to us, therefore he must be guilty.’ You can’t do that in this country or in this state,” Hayes said.

Hayes said the boy was a good student, was taking an advanced placement history class and had no prior disciplinary record. He was initially suspended for 10 days and later permanently expelled.

School administrators say they felt they had no choice but to expel him after he repeatedly refused to tell them his version of events, while they had testimony from a student who said Doe had provided the cookie, said Weston School Superintendent Cheryl Maloney.

The boy’s father sued the superintendent, and in September 2010 won a temporary injunction from a judge who reinstated the boy in school while the lawsuit is pending.

Because he missed the latter part of the school year, he had to repeat his junior year. He is now a senior. The other two boys were suspended but not expelled.

Attorney Leonard Kesten, who represents Maloney in the father’s lawsuit, argues that the judge who reinstated the boy overstepped his authority when he failed to grant “substantial deference” to the superintendent’s decision to expel the boy, as required under case law in Massachusetts.