Secret Service investigating university student Options

[latinprep12]

Twenty-one-year-old Phillip Bailey is being investigated for suggesting President Bush being shot.

Bailey is chairman of the University of Louisville Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee.

He says he posted a message on a Web site in response to someone else who suggested that looters in New Orleans should be shot. Bailey wrote that many people were simply trying to find necessities to stay alive. His posting called for shooting -- in his words --"every cop, national guard and politician who stands in your way, including George W. Bush if need be."'

The Secret Service says it'll be up to the U-S attorney's office to decide if Bailey is charged with making threats against the president. That offense can carry a five-year prison term.

The Link I looked this info up and well i hope you understand...well tell me what do you think

[ComradeRed]

And it should perfectly be legal. It's just expressing an opinion. If you say that saying "Bush should be shot" should be illegal, so should saying things like "We should invade a country". In an invasion, people die and property is destroyed. But once again, just because someone says they think it's a good idea to invade a country, doesn't mean he's going to raise a private militia and start killing and causing mayhem.

We can see the result that prosecuting him would have, just as in Britain, Parliament is debating a law with a good chance of passing that would criminalize voicing support for the terrorists, or even publishing articles that justify terrorism (i.e. it would be illegal in Britain to write an article that says the root cause of terrorism is bad foreign policy, a perfectly valid political position, just because it might be "threatening" to national security). Threats against the government are perfectly valid ways of ensuring the checks and balances system stays intact. To use a historical example, the South Carolina Nullification Crisis ultimately forced a compromise that prevented Northern mercantile interests from imposing an unduly high tariff on the South. Or to use a more modern example, people threaten their local governments every day with the prospect of "moving with their feet" if local governments do not change their policies. We can see that, a criminalization of threats against the government would turn very broad and scale and lead to the loss of self-government in favor of a majoritarian tyranny.

Nor was I trolling the Internet for case law. Black v. Virginia was a big case, that is fairly well-known, not some obscure one that I would have had to look up.

[*mipadi*]

I can certainly see your point about the necessity of freedom of speech to protect against tyranny; as I said, I personally feel that freedom of speech is one of the most important parts of the Constitution. My concerns about the use of threatening language (such as what Mr. Bailey posted) comes because, to me, it doesn't seem to be useful language; Mr. Bailey's post was hardly eloquent, and as I noted above, his critique could have been phrased in a more pro-active manner. I can certainly see the need for a group with a mission similar to that of the Secret Service to have the ability to at least investigate matters such as this; I can see a need for a balance between freedom of speech and protection of a political leader.

Naturally, of course, any limitation on freedom of speech can be abused, as you noted, which is why limitations are a sensitive issue.

I think the issue I would bring up here is a statements against the government (as are the examples you pointed out) vs. statements against a person. Arguably, statements against a political leader can figuratively be said to be statements against the government; in Mr. Bailey's case, this seems to be the case. But clearly there are other times when a person threatens the leader specifically, regardless of politics, and that seems to be a time when certain language could at least cause the speaker to come under investigation.