student adjudged delinquent did not communicate a true threat where he joked about the Columbine shootings and shared with several students a poem entitled “ ‘Dark Poetry,’ ” which stated, “ ‘I am Dark, Destructive, & Dangerous. I slap on my face of happiness but inside I am evil!! For I can be the next kid to bring guns to kill students at school. So parents watch your children cuz I’m BACK!!’ ”; court found that the poem was ambiguous and equivocal and that there were no circumstances reflecting any animosity between the writer and other students with whom he shared the poem and no conduct to suggest the immediate prospect of execution of a threat to kill
How later courts described this case
- student adjudged delinquent did not communicate a true threat where he joked about the Columbine shootings and shared with several students a poem entitled “ ‘Dark Poetry,’ ” which stated, “ ‘I am Dark, Destructive, & Dangerous. I slap on my face of happiness but inside I am evil!! For I can be the next kid to bring guns to kill students at school. So parents watch your children cuz I’m BACK!!’ ”; court found that the poem was ambiguous and equivocal and that there were no circumstances reflecting any animosity between the writer and other students with whom he shared the poem and no conduct to suggest the immediate prospect of execution of a threat to kill
- ‘‘[u]nlike some cases that have turned on an examina- tion of the surrounding circumstances given a commu- nication’s vagueness, incriminating circumstances in this case are noticeably lacking: [for example] there was no history of animosity or conflict between the [defendant and the recipients] . . . no threatening ges- tures or mannerisms accompanied the [alleged threat] . . . and no conduct suggested to [the recipients] that there was an immediate prospect of execution of [the] threat’’ [citations omitted]
- when a defendant charged with the crime of making a threat raises “a plausible First Amendment defense,” a reviewing court should independently examine the record “to make certain that what the government characterizes as speech falling within an unprotected class actually does so.”
- "[A] [m]inor's reference to school shootings and his dissemination of his poem in close proximity to the Santee school shooting no doubt reasonably heightened the school's concern that [the] minor might emulate the actions of previous school shooters. Certainly, school personnel were amply justified in taking action following [a fellow student's] e-mail and telephone conversation with her English teacher, but that is not the issue before us. We decide ... only that [the] minor's poem did not constitute a criminal threat."
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
*640 BAXTER, J., Concurring.
I concur in the result. To convict one of the felony offense of making a criminal threat, the prosecution must prove several technical and stringent elements. One of these is that the threat must have been, “on its face and under the circumstances in which it [was] made,... so unequivocal, unconditional, immediate, and specific as to convey to the person threatened, a gravity of purpose and an immediate prospect of execution of the threat.” (Pen. Code, § 422, italics added.)
Applying the independent review standard proper for cases implicating First Amendment interests, I agree the evidence does not establish this specific element. The writing, in the form of a poem, that defendant handed to Mary S. and Erin S. said that the protagonist, “Julius AKA Angel,” “can be the next kid to bring guns to kill students at school.” (Italics added.) It did not say, in so many words, that defendant presently intended to do so. And the surrounding circumstances did not lend unconditional meaning to this conditional language.
That said, there is no question that defendant’s ill-chosen words were menacing by any common understanding, both on their face and in context. The terror they elicited in Mary S., and the concern they evoked in the school authorities, were real and entirely reasonable. It is safe to say that fears arising from a raft of high school shooting rampages, including those in Colorado and Santee, California, are prevalent among American high school students, teachers, and administrators. Certainly this was so on March 16, 2001, only eleven days after the Santee incident had occurred. That is the day defendant selected to press his violent writing on two vulnerable and impressionable young schoolmates who hardly knew him.
Defendant admitted at trial that he intentionally combined the subject matter and the timing for maximum shock value. Indeed, he acknowledged, his words would be interpreted as threats by “kids who didn’t know [he] [was] just kidding.”
Under these circumstances, as the majority observe, school and law enforcement officials had every reason to worry that defendant, deeply troubled, was contemplating his own campus killing spree. The important interest that underlies the criminal-threat law—protection against the trauma *641 of verbal terrorism—was also at stake. Accordingly, the authorities were fully justified, and should be commended, insofar as they made a prompt, full, and vigorous response to the incident. They would have been remiss had they not done so. Nothing in our very narrow holding today should be construed as suggesting otherwise.