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.
They allow recklessness (so you don’t have to prove intent, you just have to prove that they saw the risk and did it anyway, which I suspect would definitely happen somewhere around the third FB account).
The guy was prosecuted under an objective standard - so basically, if most people think they were threats, they were threats. That’s a very high standard for a criminal conviction.
Kagan makes some extremely reasonable points about how the distinction between hardcore political advocacy and incitement to crime is pretty damn narrow, so you have to insist on at least a recklessness standard. She’s right, and so are the other ones who joined her.
I’m certainly not a lawyer but I think this is not really condoning his behavior, it’d likely still be prosecuted under an acceptable law, but that the law itself was too restrictive about what would be considered a threat. Does that seem right?
@Popehat has a pretty good rundown https://popehat.substack.com/p/supreme-court-clarifies-true-threats