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US Supreme Court sides with man who sent female musician barrage of unwanted messages (www.reuters.com)

submitted 1 year ago by socphoenix@midwest.social to c/news

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[–] BeegYoshi@lemm.ee 63 points 1 year ago (24 children)

Completely insane ruling. Wild that Kagan went across the aisle for this.

the First Amendment requires proofs of mental state

So I guess it's basically impossible to convict anyone of anything involving speech? If I yell "fire" in a crowded theater, how can you prove I wasn't having a delusion that there was a fire? Maybe there was an explosion in the movie and I was so immersed I thought it was real!

Dude had previous convictions and spent years doing this harassing, it's not like this was an isolated mental break. Truly insane.

[–] mutalias 5 points 1 year ago

Counterman had a history of making violent threats to women and was on supervised release from one such federal conviction during the two years he continuously messaged Whalen.

The ruling did not go that far, saying prosecutors need only show that a speaker acted recklessly, meaning the person was "aware that others could regard his statements as threatening violence and delivers them anyway."

This goes to your point which, hyperbole aside, I think the bar for judging a statement as a threat unless it is unequivocal in its phrasing or the perpetrator literally admits their intent is set impossibly high here. I can't see how you get a more clear cut situation of where someone ought to understand that their words were causing distress.

In this scenario you literally have the authorities going "what you're doing is threatening people." The person then goes on to keep doing that thing, and then somehow successfully fields the defense that "he didn't understand that it was coming off as threatening."

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