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US Supreme Court sides with man who sent female musician barrage of unwanted messages (www.reuters.com)

submitted 1 year ago by socphoenix@midwest.social to c/news@beehaw.org

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[–] Nepenthe@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Among Counterman's communications to Whalen were messages that read: "Was that you in the white Jeep?" and "You're not being good for human relations. Die. Don't need you." Others used expletives. . . .

. . . . Whalen has described the messages from Counterman, which came to her over a two-year span beginning in 2014, as life-threatening and life-altering. She never responded to Counterman during this time and blocked his Facebook account at least four times, prompting him to continue messaging her from other platforms or through new Facebook accounts he created. . . .

"In a world rife with misunderstandings and miscommunications, people would be chilled from speaking altogether if they could be jailed for failing to predict how their words would be received. The First Amendment provides essential breathing room for public debate by requiring the government to demonstrate that the defendant acted intentionally or recklessly," Hauss said.

Well, it's good that we have safeguards for those who sit on their phone wrong and thereby unintentionally create block-evading accounts on multiple platforms. Guy really went to jail and it was all two solid years of misunderstandings. /s

I'm hearing harassment officially can't be prosecuted, if we're turning a blind eye to that degree. A lot of people are going to be emboldened by this, like they already took the law seriously anyway.

Like, yeah, a friend of mine nearly or actually got run off the road several times because the perpetrator wanted to date his gf, but maybe the would-be murderer was just a really bad driver. It was a notoriously dangerous road for both of them to be on ¯\_ (ツ) _/¯

The saddest part of this is I'm more shocked the CO police did something about it. Over here, they refused even a restraining order until we could show them a physical crime, which...you know, would kinda be too late.