Its Now Okay to Send Death Threats to Corporations

You can now send death threats in the mail to groups, organizations and corporations, so long as it isn’t addressed to a specific person. Thank you, Ninth Circuit.

From Wired here:

An Arizona man who plotted a massacre outside the 2008 Super Bowl had his conviction overturned Monday by a federal appeals court because his snailmailed death threats went to no specific targets.

The case concerned Kurt William Havelock, who drove to the Super Bowl in Glendale, Arizona, with a newly purchased assault rifle and dozens of rounds of ammunition with the intent to kill. “It will be swift and bloody,” he wrote media outlets in packages mailed a half hour before he got cold feet and abandoned his plan. “I will sacrifice your children upon the altar of your excess.”

Federal authorities charged him with six counts of mailing threatening letters. The defendant was convicted on all charges and sentenced to a year in prison.

During the trial and on appeal, the 40-year-old, who was disgruntled that he was denied a liquor permit to open a bar, argued that he committed no crime at all. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in a 2-1 decision.

Under the threatening-letters statute, “the ‘person’ to whom the mail is addressed must be an individual person, not an institution or corporation,” wrote Judge William Canby, who was joined by Judge Betty Fletcher. Havelock’s communications were mailed to media outlets, not named individuals, the majority noted.

The law, the San Francisco-based appeals court wrote, “does indeed require that the mailed item containing the threat is addressed to an individual person, as reflected in the address on the mailed item. Because Havelock’s communications were not so addressed to individual persons, we reverse his convictions.”

These morons love to interpret a law to grant broad rights, such as a right to privacy where none was ever written into the constitution. But refuse to interpret a law meant to protect people from having to respond to a threat such as intended violence.