Whooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooosh!
Note to self: temper expectations of a shout-out from Merkwurdigliebe in the “praise for Dopers” thread
My friend was interviewed on the Today show this morning http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/25898281#25898281
Her phone interview is about halfway through the article and she sounds very calm and Amishly forgiving.
No, he wasn’t planning to kill himself as the police closed in. His note indicates he was planning suicide by cop - he didn’t have the balls to kill himself, he wanted some policeman to have to do it.
Sampiro, I see others have fought your ignorance. Unitarianism and Universalism were each Christian sects, though when they joined to become the UU in the 60s the denomination took a turn toward the secular humanist. There are, as others have said, Christian UUs (they even had/have their own sub-group, the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship, though I’m a little unclear on its current status).
Well, I think most DAs would disagree. Doesn’t anyone ever watch Law & Order?
Wrong. Calling for the death of any group is illegal and has been upheld multiple times as not protected speech. They used this law to go against the Klan and other white supremacist groups in advocating the death of those supporting race mixing and the like.
Sounds like it’s time for an expert. Any of our board lawyers care to weigh in with cited opinions on whether there’d be a ghost of a chance for a lawsuit in this case?
I’d personally guess there wouldn’t be.
Daniel
Most of the legal actions brought against the Klan were under the RICO Act, which was originally enacted by Congress to go after urban organized crime- ie. the Mafia.
What law are you talking about?
The closest I can think of is that the SPLC has sued racist organizations for actions taken by members who aren’t acting under orders, and if I recall correctly (and I may not), part of their legal theory was that the organization’s message contributed to the member’s actions.
That would be extremely different from a case like this, where the guy wasn’t a member of O’Reilly Inc. or anything. While I believe we need to call Savage et al. out on the carpet, I don’t support a lawsuit, nor do I think one would succeed.
Daniel
I would say absolutely zero chance of a successful suit here against right wing radio hosts.
When? If the group is small enough, I can see how it could be viewed as targetted enough to have a significant likelihood of leading to actual violence. But to try and apply that to a group like “liberals” is pushing it slightly, I’d say.
The lawsuits against Aryan Nation, the Klan, et al busted them for advocating violence against minorities. I think it’s the specificity of their advocacy, and their membership system, that makes them legally liable. Coulter, Savage, and co. aren’t nearly as specific in advocating violence, I think.
Daniel
Okay, finally I’ve turned up something of what i’m talking about.
SPLC sues the Church of the Creator out of existence. In brief, the CotC ran a newsletter advocating white supremacist violence and praising murders of Jews and “mud people.” A “reverend” within the church (who from the complaint sounds like a pretty low-level peon) murdered a black man. The Church’s newsletter praised the murder. The complaint suggests that the Church be held liable for the murder. They won.
Daniel
The civil suits weren’t on the basis of advocacy but of actual actions taken by the group - see Donald v. UKKKA, for example. The Klan was held liable for lynchings, beatings, bombings and so on in much the same way that any other voluntary association - a college fraternity, a tennis club, or church - may be held liable for actions taken by members.
The complaint suggests asks that the Church be held liable for the murder because the murder was committed by a COTC member acting on its behalf:
Again, they’re not liable because of their advocacy but because of their action.
It is a HUGE step to go from member of Noe-Nazi organization acts on encouragement from that organization to commit crimes, leading to financial liability for that organization (similar in effect to a corporation being liable for the action of its employees in some situation) to Anne Coulter advocating shooting liberals and therefore accepting liability when a single listener (ignoring the idea that you would have to prove they listened to a particular instance of incitement) shoots a liberal.
I got an email from my church, Community Unitarian-Universalist Church, about the shooting. The woman who was killed was visiting from a nearby congregation.
We’re holding a vigil in her honor tonight.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. Had it merely been a newsletter praising the murder generally, there would be no real case.
The lawsuit alleged that the Church, on its property, trained “White Rangers” and “White Berets” with weapons and military tactics, to kill “mud race” members, and that the Church knowingly accepted money derived from criminal acts by its members to further inflict violence on its targets.
Obviously, we have free speech guarantees. Equally obviously, if I agree with you that we’re going to kill the mayor of Podunk, and we work out a plan to shoot him and get away, and I go out and buy the Halloween masks that we’re going to use as disguises to get away after the murder, I have committed a crime… even though the only things I’ve done are (1) talk, and (2) buy perfectly legal items.
Because free speech, as an ideal, is in tension with the idea that there are kinds of speech that we can punish as criminal, the short answer is that there’s no bright-line rule. As a guiding principle, the more general speech is, the more it’s protected. The more specifically speech exhorts specifically criminal acts, against specific individuals, the more likely it can be found to be criminal.
Similar principles apply to civil liability, although I’m not so much up to speed with the civil law arena, so I’ll let someone who knows their stuff speak in more detail there.
Thanks for showing up, Bricker!
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