this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
33 points (100.0% liked)
World News
22056 readers
39 users here now
Breaking news from around the world.
News that is American but has an international facet may also be posted here.
Guidelines for submissions:
- Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
- Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
- Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
- Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
- Social media should be a source of last resort.
These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.
For US News, see the US News community.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Completely insane ruling. Wild that Kagan went across the aisle for this.
So I guess it's basically impossible to convict anyone of anything involving speech? If I yell "fire" in a crowded theater, how can you prove I wasn't having a delusion that there was a fire? Maybe there was an explosion in the movie and I was so immersed I thought it was real!
Dude had previous convictions and spent years doing this harassing, it's not like this was an isolated mental break. Truly insane.
Yeah, the fact that he sent messages over multiple years, opened various accounts after the artist blocked him, and was actively messaging her about seeing her in public is pretty cut-and-dry stalking. Death threats are damning as well. Sure, he might not be mentally stable, but that shouldn’t give him a pass for reprehensible and dangerous behavior.
Seems like the actual issue was that the law in question would let him be convicted even if he wasn't doing these things and just being a nuisance. It's not that he's innocent, it's that the law used is itself illegal.
To be clear, I do not agree with the ruling, but the ruling was on whether this was a federal or a civil matter. I think the government should strongly prevent clear harassment and reasonable threats of violence, but the supreme court decided that threats or words are not enough in this case. I think it's particularly two-faced, especially in light of threats of violence being used regularly to prosecute minorities and identify potential terrorists, but threats of violence directed towards a single person in the context of years of harassing behavior and a known pattern of behavior were apparently not enough.
If I had to guess, the court was wary of allowing any potential attacks to the 1st amendment, as they have been want to do in the past - a famous example of this in (somewhat) recent history is when the supreme court held that the 1st amendment was more important than the stolen valor act passed just a few years earlier. The ruling doesn't particularly surprise me, nor does Kagan swapping sides because in the US we have a strong free speech identity and free speech limitations in terms of harassment has almost never been ruled on (one might make the argument that virginia v. black might be one such case, but that's a case of racially motivated hate speech which is not quite analogous here).