• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, June 1, 2015

In a closely watched case about free speech online, the Supreme Court today reversed the conviction of Anthony Elonis, who was prosecuted for allegedly making threats on Facebook.

The Supreme Court ruled that the trial judge wrongly told the jurors they could vote guilty based on their belief that a “reasonable person” should have known that his Facebook messages would have been perceived as threats.

The prosecution stemmed from a series of messages that included violent imagery and poems in the style of rap lyrics.

“Did you know that it’s illegal for me to say I want to kill my wife?” he wrote in one post. “It’s one of the only sentences that I’m not allowed to say. . . . Now it was okay for me to say it right then because I was just telling you that it’s illegal for me to say I want to kill my wife.”

Elonis, who said he emulated Eminem, also posted his own rap lyrics, like: “Fold up your PFA [protection-from-abuse order] and put it in your pocket/Is it thick enough to stop a bullet?”

In 2011, a jury found Elonis guilty of threatening his ex-wife, among others. U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence Stengel in Philadelphia sentenced Elonis, a/k/a “Tone Dougie,” to 44 months in prison.

During his trial, Elonis asked Stengel to tell the jurors that they could only issue a guilty verdict if they found that he “intended to communicate a true threat.”

Instead, the judge told the jury that they could convict Elonis if a “reasonable person” would have foreseen that the Facebook posts would be interpreted as threats.

Elonis appealed the conviction, arguing that the prosecution didn't prove that he intended to threaten anyone. He also argued that his posts were “fictitious lyrics” and protected by free speech principles.

The ACLU, Center for Democracy & Technology and other civil rights groups argued that the conviction should be reversed -- though they stopped short of completely backing Elonis' free-speech arguments. Instead, those groups argued in a friend-of-the-court brief that the judge didn't properly instruct the jury about the law.

“This case involves a series of disturbing comments expressing petitioner’s violent thoughts and desires involving his estranged wife, among others,” those groups argued. “Those comments were undeniably crude and offensive. A properly charged jury might or might not have concluded that they also constituted a threat in context. The jury in this case was not properly charged, however. Instead, it was permitted to convict without a finding that Elonis intended his comments to be understood as a threat.”

The Supreme Court agreed that the judge didn't give the jury the right instructions.

“The jury was instructed that the Government need prove only that a reasonable person would regard Elonis’s communications as threats, and that was error,” the court wrote. “Federal criminal liability generally does not turn solely on the results of an act without considering the defendant’s mental state.”

The case will now return to the lower courts, where Elonis will be entitled to a new trial.