On October 22, 2008 a Californian man, Walter Bagdasarian, posted racist comments on a Yahoo! message board in which he called for Barack Obama to be killed.
Mr. Bagdasarian was reported to the Secret Service. After the investigation he was charged with and convicted of uttering criminal threats. A Californian federal appeals court has overturned this conviction in an opinion filed on Tuesday.
The plaintiff was drunk at the time of the comments and besides the court has concluded that any average person would have understood him to mean that he was for such an assassination in general but not intending to carry one out.
Comment: Based on the details I've read it would have been irresponsible not to investigate the defendant and I think his comments went too far. So I rather wish that he would have had to pay for the Secret Service investigation or given some form of community service around victims of shootings or (though this is less relevant to the actual criminal charges) around African-Americans so that he would have the opportunity to have more enlightened ideas about the advisability of gun crimes and about racism. As it is, he was originally ordered to serve two months at a halfway house.
Besides I wonder, looking at the Huffington Post article mentioned below, who posted his $100,000 bail (which is, after all, a lot of money) back in 2009 — whether his actions and views have the support of people with more money and more power than him.
***
"Urging Obama’s Assassination Is Lawful Online Speech, Divided Appeals Court Says" [Wired.com], by David Kravets (July 19, 2011)
(Decision) [United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit] (July 19, 2011)
"Walter Bagdasarian Convicted Of Making Racially-Charged Threats Against Then-Candidate Obama" [Huffington Post] by the Associated Press (July 28, 2009)
