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| Court throws out conviction of man who posted violent rap lyrics on Facebook | Court throws out conviction of man who posted violent rap lyrics on Facebook |
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| The supreme court on Monday ruled in favor of a man who wrote about smothering his ex-wife on Facebook, overturning his criminal conviction but avoiding a decision about whether his posts merited free speech protections. | |
| Anthony Elonis was prosecuted for making illegal threats after he posted Facebook rants, some in the form of rap lyrics, which also considered harming law enforcement officials and shooting up a school. | |
| Elonis claimed the government had no right to prosecute him if he didn’t intend his comments to be threatening to others. The Obama administration said the test was whether the comments would strike fear in any reasonable person. | |
| Led by chief justice John Roberts in a 7-2 decision, the court said Elonis could not be convicted on criminal charges only because a “reasonable person” felt threatened by his posts. | |
| While both Roberts and the dissenting justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, trotted out various definitions of the word “threat”, the court did not describe what standard of proof lower courts should use in similar cases. | |
| “Communicating something is not what makes the conduct ‘wrongful’,” Roberts wrote. “The ‘general rule’ is that a guilty mind is ‘a necessary element in the indictment and proof of every crime.’” | |
| Roberts also noted that there are exceptions, and that a defendant might not necessarily know “his conduct is illegal before he may be found guilty”. | |
| Elonis was convicted on criminal charges in 2011, after writing a series of Facebook posts about how he wanted to kill his wife (from whom he is now divorced), and continuing to write them after a judge issued a restraining order against him. | |
| Elonis promptly wrote of the order on Facebook: “Is it thick enough to stop a bullet?” | |
| After his arrest and trial and only a few hours of deliberation, a jury found Elonis guilty for breaking a law about interstate communications that contain “any threat to injure the person of another”. He was sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison and was released last year. | |
| The current supreme court has leaned toward rulings in favor of broad speech rights, but in this case it dodged a discussion of Elonis’ graphic and violent posts. | |
| “There’s one way to love you but a thousand ways to kill you,” he wrote in one post. | |
| ‘If I only knew then what I know now,” he wrote in another, “I would have smothered your ass with a pillow. Dumped your body in the back seat. Dropped you off in Toad Creek and made it look like a rape and murder.” | |
| In other posts he wrote about destroying a central Pennsylvania amusement park that fired him, attacking law enforcement agents and murdering kindergarten students. | |
| “I’m checking out and making a name,” he wrote. “Enough elementary schools in a ten mile radius to initiate the most heinous school shooting ever imagined. And hell hath no fury like a crazy man in a kindergarten class. The only question is … which one?” | |
| Elonis often wrote the tirades as rap lyrics, sometimes interspersed with disclaimers about free speech, and argued in court that they were intended not as threats but as “therapeutic” songwriting to cope with divorce and his firing from Dorney Park. He wrote them under the pseudonym “Tone Dougie”. His attorneys compared his work to that of the rapper Eminem. | |
| Attorneys for Elonis argued that the posts were protected as free speech and that their client intended no harm to his wife or others. Elonis’ ex-wife testified in earlier proceedings that she feared for her life; she won a protective order barring Elonis from coming near, harassing or contacting her, directly or indirectly. | |
| In April, Elonis was again arrested on charges of simple assault and harassment, after having allegedly thrown a pot that hit his girlfriend’s mother in the head. | |
| In his dissent, justice Alito argued that to leave the standard for recklessness unspecified “will have regrettable consequences” and that without clear standards, “attorneys and judges are left to guess”. | |
| Alito said when someone acts recklessly “he is not merely careless. He is aware that others could regard his statements as a threat, but he delivers them anyway”. | |
| “Indeed,” he added, “this court has held that ‘reckless disregard for human life’ may justify the death penalty.” | |
| Roberts and the majority of justices ruled that they did not need to decide the issue of recklessness, because no lower court had raised it. | |
| Alito also criticized the arguments put forth by Elonis, writing that therapeutic writing for one person may still constitute a criminal threat to another. He also suggested that the comparison of song lyrics versus social media posts was a fallacious one, with the former “unlikely to be interpreted as a real threat to a real person” and the latter “pointedly directed at their victims” and “much more likely to be taken seriously”. | |
| “To hold otherwise would grant a license to anyone who is clever enough to dress up a real threat in the guise of rap lyrics, a parody, or something similar,” Alito wrote. |