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PostPosted: Wed Jul 17, 2013 9:02 am 
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KenWhite wrote:
The First Amendment Protects Satire And Rhetoric! lol j/k

A nineteen-year-old has been jailed since March 27, 2013. He's been beaten — by other inmates, allegedly. He's been subjected to solitary confinement, sometimes stripped naked. The authorities have rejected calls for his release on a reasonable bail his family could possibly afford. All of this has happened because he wrote something online that concerned or offended or enraged the state.

What's that? Syria? Saudi Arabia?

No. Texas.

The nineteen-year-old is Justin Carter. Carter, like many Americans his age (or mine, for that matter) plays online games and indulges in the exaggerated trash-talk common to that culture. In the course of an argument involving the game League of Legends, he got into a dispute with another player, who called him crazy or "messed up in the head." That is a rather mild epithet coming from an online gamer; it's nothing like Carter might have gotten if, for instance, he'd had the bad taste to Game While Female.

Carter reacted the way many do in online gaming culture: with overblown rhetoric. Riffing of the idea he was crazy, he wrote: ""I think Ima shoot up a kindergarten / And watch the blood of the innocent rain down/ And eat the beating heart of one of them." Carter's family says that he immediately followed that post with "lol" and "j/k," further demonstrating — as if further demonstration was necessary — that the words were satirical bluster, not a threat anyone rational would take seriously.

But not everyone is rational. A woman in Canada — the land where freedom of expression is subservient to fee-fees — saw the post, used Google to find Justin Carter's contact information, and reported his "threat" to local police. Local police and prosecutors obtained search and arrest warrants — thoughtfully provided here at Ars Technica — and arrested Carter, eventually charging him with felony "terroristic threats."

...


Read more at Popehat, linked in the title.

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PostPosted: Wed Jul 17, 2013 12:05 pm 
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Here in Texas, they take that "terroristic threat" law very seriously, and a bit to the extreme. I was having lunch with a friend of mine, whose daughter was arrested, charged, and sentenced to 5 years of probation for telling her husbands ex wife that she was going to "set her house on fire". It was said purely out of anger as I understand, but none the less, her mouth wrote a check her ass couldn't cash.

Some laws are pushed to the max, and we get over zealous authorities here, especially during election time, who will try someone for something as petty as punching a hole in their own bathroom wall (criminal mischief). Sometimes, things should be over looked, but not here.


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