Judge orders 'Innocence of Muslims' filmmaker to jail

[Rudeman]

Thanks for the replies, +rep.

 

[oyarde]

I've seen a few people compare this video to yelling "FIRE!" in a theater. Not really sure how to respond to that.

lol , I could care less if you yell fire while I am at the theatre . I suppose , though , I should say, that I never go....

 

[Muslim brother]

His history is full of deception.
He once was on paltalk and claimed his name is ahmed hamdi !

 

[GunnyFreedom]

The Supreme Court's pertinent ruling was:


Schenck v. United States, 249 US 47 - Supreme Court 1919

That ruling was clearly about "shouting", the word "fire", and "theaters". There's no contention that Nakoula (the recently arrested filmmaker) "shouted" anything, uttered the word "fire" anywhere, or entered any "theatre".



The key factors are whether he "shouted" anything, whether he uttered the word "fire", and whether he did anything in a "theater". Intention and anger are irrelevant under the Court's ruling. They might be relevant under other rulings, but not the fire-in-a-theater one.

Even this SCOTUS ruling was wrong though. The person yelling fire in a crowded theater should not be penalized but made liable. say:

1) there was no fire or indication of fire, the yeller knew the fire to be complete fiction from the start
2) damages of some sort were incurred, whether theater loss of revenue, or patron inconvenience or injury or death

a) because the fire was fiction from the start, and the action was taken with malicious intent, the yeller is liable for the damage his yelling cost, to include revenue, inconvenience, injury, and death. Civilly liable not criminally liable.

NOW because of this damaged SCOTUS ruling, what if a ground worker accidentally gives the wrong voice command to a crane operator?

Is that speech legislatable?

Or whatever happened to "Congress shall make no law..."

Schenck vs United States is just another in a whole host of horrible and wrong SCOTUS decisions. The framers never gave the Supreme Court judicial review over the Constitutionality of legislation for a reason. That was for you, me, and the states to decide what the Constitution means.

If you do something with a malicious intent, then you are liable for the outcome. That's just a principle reality when dealing with BOTH criminal and civil matters, and if I am not mistaken the entire purpose of making 'justice' the business of a government. Since "Congress shall make no law..." then a matter of speech cannot ever rise to criminality in the United States because there may be no laws against it.

However civilly you are still responsible for damages you intentionally commit, commit with gross negligence, or become committed by others through your own clear malicious intent. Racketeering could still exist as a crime because it involves logistics and chains of command, and a lot more than pure speech.

Next time someone argues that it should be a crime to yell fire in a crowded theater, tell them that the Supreme Court was wrong, that there can be no law to criminalise speech (such laws being necessary to make something illegal), but that the person who yells fire in a crowded theater with malicious intent (ie a joke, cold curiosity, whatever no reasonable indication that there was an actual fire) should be liable for every last penny of damage, to include theater revenues, inconveniences injuries and deaths.

 

[GunnyFreedom]

Well,,yeah.

I didn't say I agree with it.. but have you looked around lately?
it is the present day reality..

And the Constitution,, that was Ron Paul's thing,, and he was rejected.

To be fair, Ron Paul's policies were not rejected. When you explained the policy in the language they spoke, nearly everyone liked it. Even foreign policy when explained to a neocon in neocon talk often found much for the person to like.

What was rejected was this cloud of propaganda that had been attached over every surface to the enigma that is Ron Paul.

 

[GunnyFreedom]

Yes, despite the law prohibiting them from doing that (18 USC 3583(d)(1), which statute protects defendants from
supervised-release conditions lacking a certain “reasonable relation”, and 18 USC 3583(d)(2), which statute protects defendants from
supervised-release conditions lacking a certain “reasonable necessity”).

Another was that I was prohibited from doing "pornographic searches". (My case had nothing to do with pornography or any kind of sex offense.) I never did figure out what a "pornographic search" is, and the higher courts have held that the term "pornography" is meaningless in this context. (https://docs.google.com/document/d/16aghF7g_FGS9jvaGb1hfsa4xTHhfbTxF9hyPEdSo-4A/edit)

Another condition was that I was prohibited from watching rated-R movies.

That's just horrible. I am sorry you ever had to deal with the injustice system. America is beyond broken right now, and we gave a great enormous lot of work to do if we are going to set things right.

 

[KingNothing]

I've seen a few people compare this video to yelling "FIRE!" in a theater. Not really sure how to respond to that.

Funny you should bring that up: http://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/t...hackneyed-apologia-for-censorship-are-enough/

Holmes' famous quote is the go-to argument by appeal to authority for anyone who wants to suggest that some particular utterance is not protected by the First Amendment. Its relentless overuse is annoying and unpersuasive to most people concerned with the actual history and progress of free speech jurisprudence. People tend to cite the "fire in a crowded theater" quote for two reasons, both bolstered by Holmes' fame. First, they trot out the Holmes quote for the proposition that not all speech is protected by the First Amendment. But this is not in dispute. Saying it is not an apt or persuasive argument for the proposition that some particular speech is unprotected, any more than saying "well, some speech is protected by the First Amendment" is a persuasive argument to the contrary. Second, people tend to cite Holmes to imply that there is some undisclosed legal authority showing that the speech they are criticizing is not protected by the First Amendment. This is dishonest at worst and unconvincing at best. If you have a pertinent case showing that particular speech falls outside the First Amendment, you don't have to rely on a 90-year-old rhetorical flourish to support your argument.

Holmes' quote is the most famous and pervasive lazy cheat in American dialogue about free speech. This post is not about fisking Sarah Chayes; her column deserves it, but I will leave it to another time. This post is about putting the Holmes quote in context, and explaining why it adds nothing to a First Amendment debate.

And, FWIW, Holmes was an atrocious enabler of The State and responsible for three of the worst SCOTUS rulings of the 20th century.

 

[KingNothing]

That's just horrible. I am sorry you ever had to deal with the injustice system. America is beyond broken right now, and we gave a great enormous lot of work to do if we are going to set things right.

Hey, I can't define pornography but I know it when I see it!

The broken-ness of our justice system is nothing new. These wheels were all put in motion generations ago.

 

[jmdrake]

I've seen a few people compare this video to yelling "FIRE!" in a theater. Not really sure how to respond to that.

By going back and reading the ruling where that idiotic idea came from. The language, from Oliver Wendall Holmes, was in a case about people protesting World War I and urging resistance to the draft. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States. Oh, and the quote is always misquoted. The word "falsely" is always left out.

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

After this ruling, Oliver Wendall Holmes realized ho much of a moron he had been. While he never actually admitted that, later rulings showed that the "clear and present danger" test makes no sense.

The Brandenburg test was the Court's last major statement on what government may do about inflammatory speech that seeks to incite others to lawless action. It resolved the debate between those who urged greater government control of speech for reasons of security and those who favored allowing as much speech as possible and relying on the marketplace of ideas to reach a favorable result, leaving the law in a state along the lines of that which Justices Louis Brandeis, and, post-Schenck, Oliver Wendell Holmes advocated in several dissents and concurrences during the late 1910s and early 1920s. As of 2011, the Brandenburg test is still the standard used for evaluating attempts to punish inflammatory speech, and it has not been seriously challenged since it was laid down in 1969. Very few cases have actually reached the Court during the past decades that would test the outer limits of Brandenburg, so the test remains largely unqualified.

 

[jmdrake]

The Supreme Court's pertinent ruling was:


Schenck v. United States, 249 US 47 - Supreme Court 1919

That ruling was clearly about "shouting", the word "fire", and "theaters". There's no contention that Nakoula (the recently arrested filmmaker) "shouted" anything, uttered the word "fire" anywhere, or entered any "theatre".



The key factors are whether he "shouted" anything, whether he uttered the word "fire", and whether he did anything in a "theater". Intention and anger are irrelevant
under the Court's ruling. They might be relevant under other rulings, but not the fire-in-a-theater one.

Actually that is not correct. Schenck had nothing to do with fires or theaters. Schenck was protesting World War I by urging people to resist the draft. What he was doing was clearly protected free speech. Oliver Wendall Holmes knew this, so he created the straw man analogy of someone falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater. His argument? Congress should be able to pass laws that protect people from "clear and present danger". And in his mind, antiwar protestors represented clear and present dangers. It's funny that most people who use this stupid reasoning from Holmes would probably support antiwar protestors.

 

[BlackTerrel]

From what I've heard from my friend the Coptic community in the US is glad this guy was arrested. They think it will calm things down and help keep the peace and their families in Egypt safe.

I think it's giving in and I don't like it.

Though I do understand it's easy for me to say when it's not my family that is at risk.