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.
Does this mean people are allowed to stalk supreme court “justices” now? It sounds like they are legalizing stalking.
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
To play devil’s advocate, I think they’re making a ruling that’s analogous to the murder/manslaughter distinction. Murder (as is commonly defined) requires the prosecution to prove intent, whereas that’s not required for manslaughter charges.
Obviously, it’s possible to prove intent in some cases because people do get convicted of murder sometimes. They’re saying the same thing here - it’s okay to convict someone for this kind of speech if you can prove their intent was harmful. But the speech equivalent of “manslaughter”, where you haven’t proven intent, is constitutionally protected.
I can see ways that this as a good ruling, frankly. I can imagine situations where someone says something that can be interpreted as a threat but that really and truly was “just a joke” or some other such misunderstanding, and I would not want that to result in a conviction.
But proving criminal intent does not require you be able to hold up a magic mirror that reflects the inner thoughts of the person’s soul.
Mens rea in the law is something you can establish. Certain actions a person takes imply intent and that’s adequate for the criminal justice system. This isn’t being flippant; often the entire purpose of the trial is to establish the criminal intent in a case where the actual facts (actus reus) are not really in dispute.
Colorado’s law is defective because it didn’t require establishing mens rea. And while some kinds of crime do not require criminal intent, because this particular crime conflicts with the first amendment, the level of scrutiny on the statute is much higher.
The outcome here should be that Colorado corrects its defective law to close the loophole.
Yeah, I think we’re in agreement. I brought up the murder analogy because it often does require intent to be proven and prosecutors do manage to find ways to prove intent in those cases. Magic mirrors are clearly not a necessity for this.