Death threats apparently OK after all

Court Rules Death Threats Against Corporations Are Legal

In a 2-1 decision, the 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a conviction against Kurt William Havelock, the 40-year-old Arizona man who plotted a massacre outside of the 2008 Super Bowl in his home state because his death threats were not mailed to any specific targets. "It will be swift and bloody," Havelock wrote in letters sent to media outlets half an hour before he abandoned his plan. (He still made it all the way to the site of the Super Bowl with his new assault rifle and dozens of rounds of ammunition.) "I will sacrifice your children upon the altar of your excess." Havelock was arrested after turning himself over the local police and was convicted on six counts of mailing threatening letters, for which he was sentenced to a year in prison. In making the decision Tuesday that overturned those convictions, Judge William Canby wrote that the threatening-letters statute requires that any death threats be addressed to an individual and not an institution or corporation. "The result of the majority's interpretation is that the statute prohibits sending a threatening communication only if the outside of the envelope or package explicitly directs deliverty to a natural person," Judge Susan Graber wrote in her dissent, which argued that the convictions should stand. The law, she noted, was adopted "to protect individuals from mailed threats of kidnapping, ransom demands, threats of bodily injury or death, and certain other serious threats." The court, she said, should have interpreted the word person in the statute to include other entities and should consider the context of the letters.

Read original story in Wired | Tuesday, Aug. 24, 2010