"" The U.S. Supreme Court is tackling a
question of increasing importance in the
age of social media and the Internet: What
constitutes a threat on Facebook?
Anthony Elonis was convicted of making
threats against his estranged wife, and an
FBI agent. After his wife left him, taking the
couple's two children with her, Elonis began
posting about her on his Facebook page.

' There's one way to love ya, but a
thousand ways to kill ya,

And I'm not going to rest until your
body is a mess,

Soaked in blood and dying from all the
little cuts.

Hurry up and die bitch.

In another post Elonis opined, "Revenge is a
dish that is best served cold with a
delicious side of psychological torture."
Elonis' wife, Tara, went to court and, after a
three-hour hearing attended by both
husband and wife, she obtained a
restraining order, barring her estranged
husband from threatening, harassing or
contacting her, even indirectly. Elonis,
however, continued his unrestricted posting
practices.
Just three days after the court hearing, he
posted another Facebook message: "Did
you know that it's illegal for me to say I
want to kill my wife?" he wrote, explaining,
"Now, it was okay for me to say it right
then because...I'm just letting you know
that it's illegal for me to say that."
Roughly a week later, Elonis posted this
about his wife:

Fold up your protective order and put
in your pocket.

Is it thick enough to stop a bullet?

The next day, he said he was ready to
"make a name for himself" with "the most
heinous [elementary] school shooting ever
imagined."

Hell hath no fury like a crazy man in a
kindergarten class,

The only question is...which one

. That post got the attention of FBI agent
Denise Stevens, who visited Elonis at home.
Afterward, he posted this message:

Little agent lady stood so close

Took all the strength I had not to turn
the bitch ghost.

Pull my knife, flick my wrist, and slit
her throat.

Leave her bleedin' from her jugular in
the arms of her partner.

Elonis was indicted on five counts of
interstate communication of illegal threats.
At his trial, he acknowledged that his verse
had some of the same violent themes as
rap songs, but argued that he had said
explicitly on his Facebook page that he was
only exercising his First Amendment free
speech rights. And he pointed out that he
had linked to other similar artistic
expressions, including a comedy sketch
about the nature of threats, and rap songs
from Eminem whose verse has fantasized
about killing his ex-wife.
At the end of the trial, the judge instructed
the jury that to convict, it must find that
Elonis' Facebook posts constituted true
threats, meaning that in context "a
reasonable person would foresee that the
statements would be interpreted ... as a
serious expression of an intent to inflict
bodily injury."
Elonis was convicted and sentenced to 44
months in prison. He appealed all the way
to the Supreme Court, contending that
under the Constitution and the federal
threat statute, a jury must find not just that
a reasonable person would interpret the
words as threatening, but that Elonis
actually intended his words to be
threatening.
"If the question had been what did he
intend, did he intend to place her in fear, it
would've been an entirely different trial,"
says attorney John Elwood, who will argue
the case in the Supreme Court on Monday.
Elwood points to evidence that he contends
shows Elonis never intended to put his wife
in fear for her life.
"The disclaimer posted all around the page
saying basically, 'this is all for
entertainment purposes only' or that 'this is
venting, don't take this too seriously,' and
when you put all that in context," it
indicates "he did not have an intent to put
anyone in fear," argues Elwood.
Elwood notes that lots of great songs have
revenge fantasies, including the Beatles'
"Run for Your Life" in which John Lennon
sings, "I'd rather see you dead little girl
than to see you with another man. ... Run,
run for your life."
But longtime federal prosecutor Patrick
Fitzgerald sees the context in the Elonis
case differently. He notes that most of the
posts occurred after Elonis' wife had gotten
a protective court order, and that Elonis
posted his messages on his Facebook page
without restriction. Thus, Fitzgerald
contends that the husband reasonably
foresaw what the reaction would be.
"The wife would read this and think, this is
not an artistic statement, this is not a
political statement about a larger cause,"
says Fitzgerald. "This is trying to get inside
her head and make her think there could be
someone doing violence to her."
Fitzgerald also rejects the comparison to
Eminem's rap fantasies. You can't have
"this little out where you dress up a threat
as being rap lyrics" and are allowed to
"terrorize people," he says.
Fitzgerald, who served 24 years as a federal
prosecutor — 11 of them as the U.S.
attorney for Chicago — sees threats as such
a problem that he actually put a "threat
button" on his prosecutors' computers in
Chicago, requiring them to report any threat
made to a witness, prosecutor or judge.
"There's an epidemic of threats out there,
and with the Internet it's going to get
worse. So, in terms of the societal value of
making sure there is a safe zone where
people aren't picking up the Internet and
feeling like they're being singled out for
violence, that's a very real issue," he says.
Cindy Southworth, vice president of the
National Network to End Domestic Violence,
underlines the point, contending that
Facebook and other social media sites
enable abusers to reach their victims with a
"click of a mouse or the touch of a screen."
"We have stalking statutes all over the
country that are based on a reasonable
person versus proving the intent of the
stalker or abuser. So I'm quite concerned
about what ripple impact this may have on
other statutes and other prosecutions if we
have to somehow get into the mind of an
abuser," she says.
But most of the friend-of-the-court briefs
filed in the Elonis case take the opposite
side. They argue that if the court allows
this conviction to stand, it would have
enormous implications for free speech rights
and artistic expression. Briefs full of
references to the F-word or female genitalia
attempt to provide a crash course on rap
storytelling for justices whose tastes, as
one wag observed, run more to Wagner and
Puccini than Eminem and Wu-Tang Clan.
A decision in the case is expected by
summer.""
Link.

This guys a regular ol Vanilla Ice lol