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Virginia Court Overturns Spammer Convictions
EvilStein writes "CNN reports that "A judge dismissed a felony spamming conviction that had been called one of the first of its kind, saying he found no "rational basis" for the verdict and wondering if jurors were confused by technical evidence." Legal groundwork being set? Will other convicted spammers now have grounds for an appeal?"
They all willingly subscribed to my penis enlargement newsletter!
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
The first is that it is a terrible injustice that these spammers won't spend 9 years in jail and have to pay $7,500 for each spam that was received. The second is that this judge is stepping way over the bounds of interpreting and applying the law and is (as it is commonly referred to) "legistlating from the bench" by declaring the punishment to not fit the crime.
The third way to look at this is that Free Speech has won the day. To this way of thinking, another attempt to squash the little guy with a big mouth has failed.
I believe it was Voltaire who said, "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
Of course he was also known to say, "A witty saying proves nothing."
Like it or not, what is happening in the courts affects the technology world more and more all the time. I think that it's important to have the broader picture.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
There's a very interesting video on the legal
aspects of this case available at
www.spamconference.org
You've Got Jail. Some First Hand Observations from the Jeremy Jaynes Spam Trial
Jon Praed, Founding Partner, Internet Law Group
In a nutshell, they convicted Jaynes' accomplice
based on the money trail and it wasn't all that
convincing. The evidence ruled inadmissable was
convincing, but not the evidence used to convict.
The person whose conviction was overturned was the 'accomplice', Jessica DeGroot. The judge upheld the conviction of her brother, Jeremy Jaynes, who is said to have led the operation. He will indeed be remaining a guest of the state for the next few years.
Out of curiosity, how/why can judges overturn convictions? Isn't the whole point of having a jury so that one biased/stupid person doesn't have the ability to single-handedly find guilty/acquit someone?
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
Perhaps it's a sign of the times. Maybe it's not that slashdot has moved from tech into law, but that law has moved increasingly into tech, something I think the majority of /. users would prefer were not the case.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
But it DOES matter to the rest of us. (Those who care about anti-spam laws everywhere)
It's called "case law". One judge somewhere makes a ruling and all judges following will treat the ruling as an appendage to the law in question. Judges, in this fashion, do write law!
It doesn't even need to be in the same state to be sited as case law. If it is a case from a different state, they will often take differences into account between the laws. I have heard rumors that laws are sometimes affected internationally by presidents set in other countries.
It may relate to a specific case, but it matters to every such case after. Especially when a new, untried type of law goes to court for the first few times (such as anti-spam).
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
From the linked article that nobody seems to have read:
Ruling Tuesday, Judge Thomas D. Horne also said jurors may have gotten "lost" when navigating Virginia's new anti-spam law in the case of Jessica DeGroot. But Horne upheld the conviction of her brother, Jeremy Jaynes, who prosecutors said led the operation from his Raleigh, North Carolina, area home.
Seems to me we are not given enough information in this article to assess what the issue was in the specific conviction that was overturned. And I'm personally not familiar with the case. Does anyone know what the situation with the sister was? Did she merely live in the same house as a spammer?
Based on the article, she could have merely been in charge of canceling his magazine subscriptions. The article just indicates that the judge claimed the jury was confused in her case.
And I found an error in the story submission too:
Virginia Court Overturns Spammer Conviction s - Why is this last word plural?
Even the story submitters don't RTFA!
The linked story indicates no more than one overturned conviction, that of the sister. A third guy seems to have been involved but there is no mention of his being convicted, hence no overturned conviction.
The poster of this article has it ALL WRONG. I live in virginia and have been following this case closely. The main spammer in question who did all the spamming, setup the spamming business, and was responsible for 100% of it WAS CONVICTED AND SENT TO JAIL. HOWEVER, during this he used his sisters credit card to purchase hardware/broadband for his spamming operation which the prosecutor thought was grounds to convict her as well. The Judge threw out HER CONVICTION ONLY due to the fact that he was convinced she had no part of it and didn't realize what the stuff her brother was buying was to be used to. THE HEAD SPAMMER DIDNT GET OFF, ONLY HIS (possibly) WRONGLY ACCUSED SISTER DID. Good lord, I wish the fuggin slashdot POSTERS would RTFA sometimes....
Nope -- spammers have the ability to completely destroy e-mail as a usable medium of communication with their crime if not deterred. Nine years is, if anything, too lenient.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Should I be allowed to stand on the street corner and hand out copies of Common Sense that I bought?
Absolutely. No question about it.
However, if you stole the paper that your pamphlet is printed on, you may still have a first amendment right to your message, but you're delivering it with stolen property. The problem with spammers is not that they have a message, and not that they're beating you over the head with it. The problem is that they are using your money to give it.
You can be forgiven for not realizing this, because in an effort to keep you as a customer, your ISP is eating the costs of each spam they receive instead of passing it on to you. However, each spam they carry is costing them a lot of money in the form of bandwidth, legal costs (spammers often sue ISPs for the exact reasons you cite), hardware upgrades, and charges to subscribe to filtering services, if they choose to do so. You don't see the grand total, but you are paying your share of those bills.
I blogged something about this today here. Seems that prosecutors had plenty of dirt to prove Jessica's involvement, including an incriminating to-do list with her name all over it. Jon Praed presented a copy of these documents at the 2005 MIT Spam Conference, video of which is linked from my blog. Praed explained that, due to a legal technicality that's beyond me, the evidence was not admissible.
A judge may not overturn a conviction simply because he would have personally found the defendant not guilty. He has to find that if the jury was acting fairly, then the conviction could not be possible. i.e. That no jury acting fairly could possibly have reached that guilty verdict.
I believe this judge was merely speculating why the jury reached the wrong verdict. I dont think there actually needs to be any finding of a specific 'cause' for the juries incorrect verdict. The statement to "confusion" is merely obiter. The court likely concluded the jury was not doing its job, which is to be FAIR and UNBIASED in its deliberation.
(as usual the media completely fails to report enough information to make sense out of what actually took place in the courtroom.)
This usually means that was no evidence before the court capable of supporting the juries conclusion, and therefore the jury either misunderstood or was using external evidence to reach its verdict, or was being vindictive and punishing the accused merely because of the victims suffering, or its outrage at the crime, rather than the evidence of guilt.
If you were tried with murder, and the murder victim was clearly still alive (and especially if the prosecutor admits the victim is alive, and the defense called the victim to the stand to attest to that), then the jury *must* acquit. The evidence can not possibly support a finding of guilt. Even if the accused was covered in the "victims" blood, and the "murder weapon" was found, and motive and opportunity was proved. If the victim is alive, then clearly no murder could possibly have been commited (unless they conclude that someone ELSE was murdered). In this case the jury must have misunderstood the evidence. That is kind of a crazy example, but it is a situation where an appeals court would reverse the jury's verdict.
Put basically... mere disagreements do not overturn decisions. More is required.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.