Borderline psychotic social media users of the world, rejoice! You can post violent, threatening messages on Facebook and claim it was poetry, or something, according to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Yesterday the highest court in the land ruled in favor of a Facebook user from Pennsylvania who had posted some pretty unsettling comments on Facebook, including one that appeared to threaten his
wife’s murder.
The justices based their decision on the fuzzy standards for what constitutes a real threat, meaning a statement indicating an intention and plan to actually do harm.
Anthony D. Elonis had previously been convicted after a jury was instructed to reach a verdict based on whether his statements could be interpreted by a “reasonable person” as indicating
this. His lawyer argued that this standard was not stringent enough, as there could still be ambiguity around the speaker’s actual intentions, and the justices agreed.
The ruling leaves
open the question of what, exactly, the standard for judging a threat should be -- obviously a fraught and complicated question as, in the absence of an actual crime or material evidence or witnesses
attesting the commissioning of a crime, the accused can always just say “I was joking,” or in this case, “it was art.”
After his wife left him, Elonis had posted
statements on Facebook including, “There’s one way to love you but a thousand ways to kill you,” as well as “Enough elementary schools in a ten mile radius to initiate the most
heinous school shooting ever imagined.” His lawyer later claimed that Elonis was writing rap lyrics as a form of self-therapy, citing inspiration by the likes of Eminem.
Of course
rappers are well known for describing acts of violence and threatening to commit crimes, but are virtually never prosecuted because this speech clearly takes place in an artistic, commercial context
(the fact that high-profile rap feuds do in fact lead to acts of violence is apparently neither here nor there, for constitutional purposes).