holding, with respect to a statute criminalizing threats against the President of the United States, that “a statute such as this one, which makes criminal a form of pure speech, must be interpreted with the commands of the First Amendment clearly in mind,” so that “a threat must be distinguished from what is constitutionally protected speech”
How later courts described this case
- holding, with respect to a statute criminalizing threats against the President of the United States, that “a statute such as this one, which makes criminal a form of pure speech, must be interpreted with the commands of the First Amendment clearly in mind,” so that “a threat must be distinguished from what is constitutionally protected speech”
- finding that the statute in question in that case must be interpreted “against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debates on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometime unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials”
- holding utterance that “[i]f they ever make me carry a rifle [upon being drafted into the U.S. military] the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.” was merely “a kind of very crude offensive method of stating a political opposition to the President” and was thus protected by the First Amendment
- holding that a man who, in protesting the draft, stated, “ ‘If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L. B. J.,’ ” did not make a true *812 threat (quoting N.Y. Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 270, 84 S. Ct. 710, 11 L. Ed. 2d 686 (1964))
Written by the judges who cited it.
Distinguished
Distinguished by State v. Krijger, 130 Conn. App. 470 (2011)
” Respectfully, we conclude that Watts is distinguishable from the present case, and we do not agree that, considering their context, the statements in Watts were “significantly more threatening” than those in the present case.
Distinguished by United States v. Raul Maisonet, 484 F.2d 1356 (1973)
Moreover, his reliance on Watts v. United States, 394 U.S. 705, 89 S.Ct. 1399, 22 L.Ed.2d 664 (1969), is misplaced because the eases are factually distinguishable.
The opinion
Mr. Justice Fortas,
with whom Mr. Justice Harlan joins,
dissenting.
The Court holds, without hearing, that this statute is constitutional and that it is here wrongly applied. Neither of these rulings should be made without hearing, even if we assume that they are correct.
Perhaps this is a trivial case because of its peculiar facts and because the petitioner was merely given a suspended sentence. That does not justify the Court’s action. It should induce us to deny certiorari, not to decide the case on its merits and to adjudicate the difficult questions that it presents.