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."

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