Watts vs. US

[MoshMasterD]

Need you opinion and discussion on this.....

Watts v. United StatesIn the case of Watts v. United States, the United States Supreme Court ruled that mere political hyperbole must be distinguished from true threats. At a DuBois Club public rally on the Washington Monument grounds, a member of the assembled group suggested that the young people present should get more education before expressing their views. The defendant, an 18-year-old, replied:

“ They always holler at us to get an education. And now I have already received my draft classification as 1-A and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L. B. J. ”

According to court testimony, the defendant in speaking made a gesture of sighting down the barrel of a rifle. The audience responded with laughter and applause, which the Court of Appeals would later view as potentially ominous: "t has not been unknown for laughter and applause to have sinister implications for the safety of others. History records that applause and laughter frequently greeted Hitler's predictions of the future of the German Jews. Even earlier, the Roman holidays celebrated in the Colosseum often were punctuated by cheers and laughter when the Emperor gestured 'thumbs down' on a fallen gladiator."[48]

The boy was arrested and found to be in possession of cannabis, but a Court of General Sessions Judge suppressed the cannabis because he found that there had been no probable cause for the Secret Service agents to believe the defendant's words constituted a threat to the President.[48] This did not prevent a federal court from convicting him for threatening the President. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed his conviction, but the Supreme Court reversed, stating, "We agree with petitioner that his only offense here was 'a kind of very crude offensive method of stating a political opposition to the President.' Taken in context, and regarding the expressly conditional nature of the statement and the reaction of the listeners, we do not see how it could be interpreted otherwise." In a concurring opinion, William O. Douglas noted, "The Alien and Sedition Laws constituted one of our sorriest chapters; and I had thought we had done with them forever ... Suppression of speech as an effective police measure is an old, old device, outlawed by our Constitution."[49]

[SSG Snuggle Bunny]

The issue at hand in the modern day is how should we express ourselves when we want to specifically seek out several vulnerable political opponents; IOW, "target" their seats.

The debate will--literally and of natural course--degenerate into one of semantics.

The left has not only used "target" imagery themselves they are saying, in essence, that an advertising firm that has "sales targets" is inciting its employees to exert act pf violence as a means to achieve revenue quotas. The retort naturally follows, "context matters."

Indeed, it does and that is why targeting someone for non-violent replacement via political mechanisms is not a call for violence but merely voter engagement.