The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out the stalking conviction of a Colorado man who sent hundreds of unwanted Facebook messages to a female musician, ruling that state prosecutors had not shown that he was aware of the "threatening nature" of his statements.
  • Remillard@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    If I understand right, this is a clarification (of sorts) to the standard of “true threat”. Ken White covers a lot of first amendment speech issues and has a very good explanation here: https://popehat.substack.com/p/supreme-court-clarifies-true-threats

    So. To the practitioner, or to the internet tough-talker, what does this mean? It means that the law of the land, at least 7-2, is that a threat is only outside the protection of the First Amendment if:

    • A reasonable person, familiar with the context, would interpret the threat as a sincere statement of intent to do harm, and
    • The speaker was reckless about whether the threat would be taken sincerely — that is, they “consciously disregarded a substantial risk” that it would be taken seriously.