"Nuremberg Files" Decision Overturned

PeterMiller writes "ABC News is running a story on a US federal appeal court that threw out a record $109 million verdict against anti-abortion rights activists. From the article: 'If defendants threatened to commit violent acts, by working alone or with others, then their [works] could properly support the verdict,' Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski wrote. 'But if their [works] merely encouraged unrelated terrorists, then their words are protected by the First Amendment.' My question is, what does this do to every other lawsuit claiming a website, movie, video game or song lead someone to a violent act?" Readers may recall that this case involved an anti-abortion website which published the names and addresses of doctors who provided abortion services, and cheered whenever one of them was killed. Our previous stories are here and here. The Appeals Court's opinion reviews the history of the case, and the finding that the statements on the website were not true threats under U.S. law and were thus protected speech. There used to be a number of mirrors of the site available - most of them seem to have disappeared, but this one is still up, minus the lists of doctors.

Comments

Re:ACLU Non-Partisian

[Phillip Birmingham]

This was fought tooth and nail by that bastion of non-partisian free speach advocates the ACLU right?

I don't know -- should we go see what they say, or just keep guessing?

From a press release concerning the original verdict, which you'd have found if you had let a thought get past the medulla oblongata, and actually gone to look:

The ACLU of Oregon believes that the safety of the physicians and clinic workers who provide abortion services can be protected without compromising the fundamental protections of free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. Our involvement as a friend of the court in this case has been designed to help the court find the appropriate line between protected and unprotected speech under our Constitution. We will continue to play that role as this case moves forward.

...

Prior to trial, we argued that the Court should have adopted a stricter constitutional standard in this case to distinguish between unlawful threats and protected speech. We still believe the jury should have been asked to determine whether the evidence showed that the defendants intended to threaten these abortion providers.

BTW -- there's no "a" in "speech" and only two "m"s in "amendment". Hope this helps.

A tale of two rulings

[kzinti]

Much as I despise these right-wing wackos, I love my First Amendment even more. So I'm pleased that the court would defend it.

Something more that interests me is what happens when you consider this ruling in light of another one covered here on /. not too long ago in this story:

http://slashdot.org/yro/01/02/26/1622248_F.shtml

And the CNET article referenced from the Slashdot discussion:

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-4930756.html? tag=nbs

The gist of the story is that the high school students published satire aimed at his high school principal on his own time, and on a web site entirely independent of the school. When the school district tried to punish the student, he sued and won. The court ruled that the school had no jurisdiction over the student's speech rights as practiced on his own time and his own equipment. And rightly so. You high school kids still have some speech rights in the eyes of the courts.

Now consider today's case, in which the court said that the anti-abortion speech is protected, including the "hit lists", so long as the speech doesn't directly threaten to commit violent acts. Wow. Juxtapose this case against the high school case from some weeks ago and tell me what you see.

How long is it going to be until we hear about some high school kid publishing a hit list on his personal web site? I thinking here of a list a teachers, administrators, bullies, and the like... of course, this kind of thing is probably happening already, but now it's protected. Are more kids going to start doing this kind of thing? How will the school districts react? Will they continue to suspend and expel... or will they just call the police?

It's a fascinating situation. It's great that speech rights on the Internet are seeing some protection, especially for students, but I'm wondering how these new protections are going to be interpreted by today's high school kids, and what the repercussions are going to be when they start pushing the envelope with them.

--Jim

This is actually a great post

[Kohath]

This is actually a great post. It completely illustrates the reason for a constitutionally constructed society.

The attitude is clear:

I want X. I'm going to get X. I'm ENTITLED to X. If your Y needs get in the way, you'd better watch out. If you stand in my way with your Y, I'll take away your Z and anything else I have to, including your W. I'm going to get X.

In this case, X="an abortion", Y="Free Speech", Z="money", and W="freedom".

Try X="guns" or X="money" or X="a pizza" or X=anything. Fill in the other variables with things you'd like not to be taken away.

The reason for laws and a constitution is to prevent this type of attitude from prevailing.

Re:The judges are right

[taxman_10m]

It goes beyond religion.

There are athiest prolifers: http://www.godlessprolifers.org

And there are libertarian arguments against abortion: http://www.l4l.org

To view the issue as a "religious issue" is as incorrect to view slavery as a religious issue simply because many of the arguments surrounding its practice in the US were religious in nature.

What about the right of privacy?

[mwalker]

This case just outlines the need for a Privacy Bill of Rights. The Court is absolutely right - this speech is protected by the First Amendment.

But it should be absolutely banned under a Privacy Bill of Rights. Those people should be able to rant and rave about how Planned Parenthood is Hitler all they want, but they should not be able to violate the privacy rights of these doctors. Best Buy and Safeway shouldn't be able to sell my purchase profile from my "Safeway Club Card" to direct marketers and my health insurance company. Digital consumer profiles and personal profiles should be identified as tradeable items that are the intellectual property of the identified person.

If ever there was intellectual property, it's your own name, address, and SSN. And publishing people's names against their will along with other identifying information, for the purpose of having them executed or any other malicious reason (even calling them at dinner to sell them life insurance) should be explicitly prohibited.

at least, that's what i think.

Thank you.

[KahunaBurger]

I'm glad I'm not the only one on this crazy group that sees any rights for people past the first two ammendments to the USC. (Or that thinks freedom can be restricted by someone other than the goverment)

I love the fact that this was labled Your Rights Online. Yeah, your on line rights are doing fine. Your offline rights to provide or recieve reproductive health services just took a trip to the shitter. A bunch of kids' rights to go to school without being harrassed, threatened or hurt because of what their parents do for a living just got trashed. But hey, it's FREE SPEECH so everything's good....

The people who run this page are disgusting terrorist fucks, and they just got the green light to keep going. You'll excuse me if I don't feel any increase in freedom from that. As far as I'm concerned, my world just got a little less free. But you'd have to let go of two preconceptions to see why, and most /.ers are really attached to those.

Freedom of speech and privacy

[Salsaman]

Whilst I agree wholeheartedly with the concept of free speech, surely the line has to be drawn when that speech includes personal information, such as somebody's address ?

What if they were publishing the doctors' credit card numbers instead - would that still be protected as free speech ?

Re:The Importance of Freedom of Speech

[SquadBoy]

That would be wrong. Justice Holmes wrote that opnion in dissent. The law in fact is such that you do have the right to yell fire in a theater. You may want to look here and here to understand why.

Can't have it both ways.

[Archangel Michael]

Both left leaning liberals and right wing conservatives want it both ways all the time. They want free speech when it suits them, and don't when it doesn't. Only Libertarians understand where the line should be drawn. If speech causes real damage and the link is clear between the damage and the speech cause, then there is a legal recourse.

This is the rational for not being able to yell "fire" in a crouded theater. The causal reaction to the speech is likely to cause real damage.

Now if we can only educate people as to why free speech should be defended even when they don't like the content. That would be real education.

Re:The Importance of Freedom of Speech

[Tyrannosaurus]

Would you still feel this same way if I published your home phone & address against your wishes? How about if I asked if someone could please use this information to harrass you (literally) to death?

What if I published your credit card numbers or social security number? Have I commited a crime if I never used that info for identity theft? What if someone else did?

My point is, not all speech is protected. Yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater is against the law. If I abuse you with 'fighting words' (following the Supreme Court's definition), you can legally beat my lights out.

Limitations do exist--its not 'all-or-nothing' as you would have us believe. My opinion in this particular case is that the court dropped the ball, and went with the letter of the law rather than the intent of the law.

---

The Importance of Freedom of Speech

[Bonker]

When I attended UT, I had dinner from time to time with an Iranian exchange student who couldn't beleive that Americans got away with so much in the way of criticising our leaders and the rich and powerful. I had to explain to him the difference between a threat and criticism, but he still couldn't beleive how liberal we were and how public we could be with our speech.

He did see, however, how important it was for us to keep hold of these freedoms, even if it meant sacrificing some safety. (I'm certain that the abortion doctors don't agree with me, but...)

For every Klan site and every kill the abortion doctor site, there's a cryptome.org or a peacefire.org who couldn't function without basic freedom of speech laws. For every nutcase redneck who promotes white power, there's a rainbow coalition website who would have been edged out by our republican, white congress, some of whom were in office and voted against civil-rights legislation in the 60's.

It is important to watch for threats and illegal behavior, but to be truly fair, free speech decisions must almost always come down in favor of the speaker.

These words are as true today as they were 50, 100 and 200 years ago: 'If it doesn't work for everybody, it doesn't work for anybody.'

Unrelated Terrorists?

[blair1q]

Unrelated?

Seems like if you apply a few degrees of Kevin Bacon to it I bet you would find that the people doing the shooting are not all that unrelated with the people doing the slandering and intimidating.

So now it's okay for, say, November 17 to come into the US and incorporate a 501(c)(3) front that recruits members for November 17 as long as it says "kill them with kindness" in the title?

There's a lot of bad craziness in this ruling. They reach back to a left-wing supportive ruling with at least as much bad craziness in it in order to support this instance of courtly insanity. It's almost as though they're trying to tangle this obvious case of hate-speech/violence in order to get a legal excuse to re-review the previous one. When the Supreme Court gets this, they can either validate the concept of violence-enabling speech as free speech, or they can fix it across all the cases cited.

And while I would agree that speech calling for violence necessary to revolutionize the government is clearly protected--it's the reason for the 1st Amendment--I don't agree that speech calling for violence against individuals engaged in medical practice should be protected. The government is not a doctor, and political action should be sufficient to decide the fate of such doctors. If political action is not sufficient, then your quarrel is with the government, not the doctors, or you're just plain wrong. In fact, I'm leaning towards the attitude that calling for violence against any person by name rather than a governmental institution is just plain wrong, though that would take some careful defining in a world where we place or inherit people in governing positions as an institution of one.

--Blair

This is about responsibilty.

[Urban Existentialist]

There is a central question here. Where does the responsibility lie? If a film portrays a violent act, and someone who watches that film then goes and commits that act in real life, who is responsible?

If the defendant can reasonably claim that the film he watched incited him to commit the act, and that hence he is not responsible, then he can reasonably claim to be innocent.

What this lawsuit says is that people who see a violent film and then commit a violent act are innocent. Is this reasonable?

Perhaps in some instances it is. The general public is, well, stupid and impressionable. European governments have recognised this for sometime, and take care of these issues for them by implementing strong censorship of violence. Hence there is little violence in European countries.

Should America foillow this lead? I think that if they can demonstrate the innocence of the defendant and think this is reasonable as the Europeans do, then yes. This is an undecided question though.

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