U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of country singer’s cyberstalker

His sentence was overturned. On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of freedom of expression in an online harassment case involving a string of threatening messages sent by a fan to country singer Coles Whalen. By a majority of seven out of nine judges, the Supreme Court ruled that a cyberstalker cannot be prosecuted and convicted if he did not know about the impact of his messages on their recipient.

“Real threats of violence are not protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution,” which guarantees freedom of speech, and “are punishable crimes,” Justice of the Peace Elena Kagan recalled on behalf of the majority. But the defendant must “have some idea of ​​the threatening nature of his statements,” she adds.

Prosecutors do not need to prove that the defendant “intentioned” to make threats, just that he “deliberately ignored the risk that his messages might be perceived as threats of violence,” the court clarifies, asking the courts to reopen Billy Counterman’s case.

Thousands of threatening messages

Between 2014 and 2016, this Colorado man sent Coles Whalen thousands of Facebook messages. “Die, I don’t need you” or “fuck you forever,” he wrote to her, opening new accounts every time she blocked him. According to the musician’s lawyers, these messages “oscillated between bizarre, nonsensical, aggressive and threatening”, and “their hostility only intensified over time.”

The young woman began to get scared, to cancel concerts. “I was afraid of harassment and attacks, I had no other choice but to put my career on hold,” she said in a statement. In 2016, she decided to file a complaint, and Billy Counterman, who had already been prosecuted for harassment, was arrested.

After being sentenced to four and a half years in prison, he filed an appeal, citing the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech. Billy Counterman “suffers from a mental illness and thought that (the singer) corresponded with him through other sites. He did not understand that he was threatening, and he was not going to do it, ”his lawyers said.

Sophisticated victim protection

Associations of journalists or civil rights activists, such as the powerful ACLU, have sided with him, fearing the risk of “unreasonable prosecution” or “censorship” if the courts are content to judge the feelings of message recipients.

But associations fighting domestic violence have warned that such a reading of the law could make protecting victims more difficult. During the hearing, the representative of Colorado recalled that 90% of feminicides were preceded by episodes of online harassment.