When is an angry Facebook rant a prosecutable offense? On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case which will weigh in on how to legally define a criminal threat in the age of social media, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The case centers on the Facebook posts of defendant Anthony Elonis, who let loose a stream of violent comments on Facebook targeting his estranged wife and others. In one comment addressing his wife, Elonis wrote, “Fold up your PFA (protection from abuse order) and put it in your pocket Is it thick enough to stop a bullet?” He also declared that there were “Enough elementary schools in a ten mile radius to initiate the most heinous school shooting ever imagined.”
After an FBI agent arrived at his house, Elonis returned to Facebook to assert that an explosives expert should visit his home because “little did y’all know, I was strapped wit’ a bomb.”
In 2011, a jury convicted Elonis of transmitting threatening communications and sentenced him to 44 months in prison. Elonis appealed the verdict, defending his Facebook posts as “fictitious” raps and as a “therapeutic” outlet for his distress and maintaining that they fall under constitutionally protected speech.
“Art is about pushing limits,” he wrote. “I’m willing to go to jail for my constitutional rights. Are you?”
Elonis also declared that a threat should only be considered prosecutable if the speaker has indicated that he intended the speech to be a threat.
The Justice Department took issue with Elonis’s definition of a criminal threat, contending that it would fail to protect the public “from the fear of violence and from the disruption that fear engenders,” which is one of the primary reasons criminal threats are illegal.
An alternative to Elonis’s definition offered by prosecutors is that a comment should be considered a threat if a reasonable person would consider it as such, irrespective of what the speaker believes.
The arguments for the case will likely open in the fall, and a ruling, which could potentially have a significant impact on the future of blog posts and online comment boards, is expected to be reached in June of next year.
