Previewing SCOTUS argument in Facebook threat case, Elonis v. United States
There is a way for the Court to decide the case of Elonis v. United States without sorting out just how far First Amendment protection extends to private expression on the Internet. In agreeing to hear the case, the Court added a question about the meaning of the federal law at issue. If it narrows the reach of that law, it may not need to say anything directly about the First Amendment, although it probably would reduce the law’s scope if it felt that was necessary to avoid having to rule on the constitutional question.
In this case, a thirty-one-year-old man, Anthony Douglas Elonis, who lives in the small Pennsylvania community of Lower Saucon Township, was convicted for postings on Facebook four years ago that prosecutors treated as actual threats of violence. The jury agreed, leading to a guilty verdict and a forty-four-month prison sentence. His messaging came after his wife had left him and he was fired from his job at an amusement park because of one of his postings….
His conviction came under a federal law that makes it a crime to “transmit in interstate or foreign commerce any communication containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another.”
The Supreme Court, in fact, has already made at least partly clear — in decisions that go back to 1969 — that the First Amendment does not permit the government to punish for all threats made in communications in the media or in the public square. It has confined prosecution to “true threats,” and has stressed that the law against threatening someone does not apply at all to “political hyperbole” or to “vehement, caustic, or unpleasantly sharp attacks” that cannot be interpreted as “true threats.”
And, in a decision in 2003, the Court attempted to say just what a “true threat” is, legally speaking. It did so in interpreting another federal law that made it a crime to burn a cross with the intent of intimidating someone. That law said any cross-burning, by the act itself, would be proof of an intent to intimidate. A plurality of the Court said that the act alone was not sufficient. “‘True threats,’” that opinion said, “encompass those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.”
In [Elonis], the Supreme Court has the task of clarifying what a person “means to communicate” when speaking in terms of violence on the Internet, and also what constitutes “an intent” to commit the crime of making an illegal threat.
Basically, this case presents the Court with two choices — first, to look at the issue of intent from a subjective perspective, focusing on the speaker, or to look at it from an objective view, focusing on both the speaker and on a hypothetical “reasonable person” exposed to the message.
Anthony Elonis and his supporters argue that his postings on Facebook were not “true threats” because he actually had no “subjective intent to threaten another person.” If that is the test, a jury would have to make its own assessment of what an Internet user like Elonis did have in mind, examining the specific words used and their context.
The federal government and its supporters, however, argue that Elonis’s statements were judged — and should have been judged — by two measures: first, did he make his statements intentionally (without regard to what he was thinking), and, second, would “a reasonable person” read the words used and their context as conveying to the target of the message that they would be injured or killed?…
The effect of the decision that does emerge almost certainly would be felt in the very public space of such Internet sites as Facebook. For that reason, Elonis is running interference for the Internet as a whole, and especially for those sites where expression is robust, indeed. Much of the discussion in the case, in fact, is on the potential impact on the very provocative postings of rap music, and its fairly common idiom of violence.