The
Supreme Court agreed in June 2014 to hear the case of Elonis
v. United States,
an important First Amendment challenge that will attempt to clarify after years
of ambiguity and split decisions in the lower courts the question of when threats,
specifically internet threats, should be taken seriously by the law.
The case will be heard on December 1st of this year, and will
clarify whether threats of
violence made on social media sites such as Facebook, should be judged by (1) whether the speaker intended to
harm anyone, or (2) whether the recipient was genuinely afraid of being harmed.
Essentially, it is a decision that will decide whether the crime should
be judged by the actor’s subjective intent or the target’s subjective belief.
Online
death threats are becoming all too common.
Recent examples include an 11-year-old who faced death
threats through Facebook
over his love of hunting, a mayor whose life was threatened by his paper boy, and hundreds of Harvard students who received
emails from a
sender who threatened to “shoot all of you” and “kill you individually.”
