Supreme court close's the lid to Pandora's box in this case.

[Zathrus~SPARTA~]

 

The US Supreme Court today said the government cannot base a prosecution for sending an Internet threat solely on how the message was perceived.

Though the ruling is based on interpreting criminal law, it amounts to another strongly pro-free expression decision from the court under Chief Justice John Roberts.

The justices ordered a new trial for a Pennsylvania amusement park worker, Anthony Elonis, who began posting threatening message on Facebook in May 2010 after his wife left him.

"What Elonis thinks does matter," the court said. His conviction was based on how his messages would be understood by a reasonable person. Such a standard, the court said, "is a familiar feature of civil liability ... but is inconsistent with the conventional requirement for criminal conduct — awareness of some wrongdoing."

In October, one of his posts said, "There's one way to love you but a thousand ways to kill you. I'm not going to rest until your body is a mess, soaked in blood, and dying from all the little cuts."

After she got a restraining order, he wrote, "Put it in your pocket. Is it thick enough to stop a bullet?"

In November, two years before the mass killing at Sandy Hook, he wrote:

"Enough elementary schools in a ten mile radius to initiate the most heinous school shooting ever imagined."

Elonis was arrested in December 2010 and charged with violating a federal law that makes it a crime to transmit threats to injure someone else. He said he was kidding, imitating explicit rapper Eminem, but a jury convicted him.

His lawyer argued that the legal test for a true threat should be the intent of the person making the statement. But the Obama administration aruged that a message is illegal if a reasonable person would consider it threatening, regardless of what the sender intended.

A bomb threat, the Justice Department said, causes harm regardless of whether the sender means it or not.

 

This is a surprising stand by the Supreme Court but I do agree with them. The problem with the lower court's decision it is basically made it illegal to even joke you were going to mess someone up. So technically, you could take the transcripts from game chat, and accuse someone of threatening you bodily harm. Because of the lower court's decision, really it did not matter what the context of the message was, you were guilty of a federal crime.

This was essentially Pandora's box opening. Luckily the supreme court has closed this lid to Pandora's box.

 

While I agree people should be stopped from threatening people online in a real sense, it is important the law accommodate the context in which something is said. Otherwise, anyone who games in an FPS for instance and likes to get vocal could be guilty of a federal crime.

Edited June 1, 2015 by Zathrus~SPARTA~

[Pringle~SPARTA~]

I hadn't heard of this. Pandora's Box indeed.

[Cylawyer~SPARTA~]

A proper decision. IMO.