EFF and Student Press Law Center Urge Supreme Court to Require Government to Show Subjective Intent in Threat Cases

In our highly digitized society, online speech like posts, messages, and emails, can be taken out of context, repackaged in ways that distort or completely lose their meaning, and spread far beyond the intended recipients.With this in mind, we are urging the Supreme Court to rule that any time the government seeks to prosecute someone for threatening violence against another person, it must show that the speaker subjectively intended to threaten before their speech can be considered a "true threat" not protected by the First Amendment.In a brief filed with the Student Press Law Center, we argued that people should not face prison time because they misjudged how many people would see their speech or how an unintended recipient would react to the speechThe First Amendment requires that true threats are only those in which a speaker subjectively intends to threaten someone, so as to prevent protected speech such as humor, art, misunderstandings, satire, and misrepresentations, we told the court.True threats are one of the very few categories of speech that has no constitutional protection.

Read at Electronic Frontier Foundation