The First Amendment

Great Debates
1

The First Amendment:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” -The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution-

No let see it in detail:

Religion: The First Amendment prohibits government from establishing a religion and protects each person’s right to practice (or not practice) any faith without government interference.
Free speech : The First Amendment says that people have the right to speak freely without government interference.
Free press: The First Amendment gives the press the right to publish news, information and opinions without government interference. This also means people have the right to publish their own newspapers, newsletters, magazines, etc.
Assembly: The First Amendment says that people have the right to gather in public to march, protest, demonstrate, carry signs and otherwise express their views in a nonviolent way. It also means people can join and associate with groups and organizations without interference.
Petition: The First Amendment says that people have the right to appeal to government in favor of or against policies that affect them or that they feel strongly about. This freedom includes the right to gather signatures in support of a cause and to lobby legislative bodies for or against legislation.

Now I am going to give you some facts about two cases that were kind of controversial:

The Strange Fate of The Hit Man Lawsuit

1983 — Paladin Press publishes Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors. More than 13,000 copies are sold.
January 24, 1992 — James Perry orders Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors from a Paladin Press catalog.
1992 — Believing he will inherit a $1.7 million insurance settlement, Lawrence Horn hires Perry to kill his ex-wife, Mildred Horn, and his disabled son, Trevor.
March 3, 1993 — James Perry travels from Detroit to Silver Spring, Maryland. He shoots Mildred Horn and Trevor’s private nurse Janice Saunders, and disconnects Trevor’s breathing tube. All three are left dead. Police search Perry’s home and find textbooks on criminal forensics and a Paladin Press catalog. An investigation reveals Perry ordered Hit Man and How to Make Disposable Silencers, although neither book is found in Perry’s home.
November 1995 — Perry is convicted and placed on death row; six months later, Horn is sentenced to life in prison.
January 1996 — The families of Mildred Horn and Janice Saunders file a lawsuit against Paladin Press. In September, U.S. District Court Judge Alexander Williams, Jr. throws it out, finding no liability on Paladin’s part.
November 1997 — The 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals reinstates the lawsuit, ruling that the book is not protected by the First Amendment because, “Hit Man is, pure and simple, a step-by-step murder manual, a training book for assassins.”
April 4, 1998 — The Supreme Court refuses to hear the case, allowing the lawsuit to continue.
May 21, 1999 — Three days before the case is to go to trial in a federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Maryland, Paladin’s insurance company settles the case for undisclosed millions…

However, that was not all…In 1998 while Wilson and her husband, Robert Leslie Goggin, 29, were getting a divorce. Goggin hired Robert Vaughn Jones, also 29, to murder his wife in exchange for $100,000 from her life insurance policy. Goggin and Jones each were sentenced in 1999 to 17 1/2 years in prison for the attack. In court, Jones testified that Goggin recruited him to kill Wilson. Jones said he then purchased Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors, published by Paladin Enterprises. In her lawsuit, Wilson outlined two dozen points of advice from the book that Jones followed to the letter in planning to kill her. The advice covered such points as disposing of evidence, creating a disguise, selecting weapons and avoiding conviction if caught, according to court records in the case.
Paladin lawyers had claimed Hit Man was intended for a broad audience of crime buffs and mystery writers. However, the company agreed in September 2000 to stop selling the book in a settlement of the Maryland lawsuit.
Mind you, even though this book is not for sale anymore.You can find it online and even a movie was made about this case entitled “The Hitman”

The case of Dennis Barrie

The work of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is uncontroversial since it includes a few pictures, some sadomasochistic and others blasphemous seemingly calculated to offend. Dennis Barrie, curator of the Cincinnati Arts Center, exhibited Mapplethorpe’s show The Perfect Moment, despite the fact that he knew that such photographs would be criticized.However, what he did not expect what happened next. He was promptly charged with “pandering obscenity.”
With the indictment of Mr. Barrie and the Contemporary Arts Center, the fight crystallized here into a legal question over what museums can and cannot show. What is art? Should anything be censored? Should there be any limits to the First Amendment?
This case is believed to be the first criminal trial of an art museum arising from the contents of an exhibition.
Your thoughts?

Madelinne

2

I’ve always been in disagreement with every obscenity law in existance. The days of moral censorship are over. Atleast I thought so.

3

I actaully have a copy of the book. It isn’t all that great and the stuff it tells you can be found ALL over the place, not to mention some of it is just plain wrong.

I think certain things should be censored, such as a detailed instruction manuel on how to build an atomic bomb. Also, Palladuim Press settled, in my opinion, because they did not want to go to trial as that would probably cease their sales and bring about bad publicity. As it is they recieved a lot of publicity for “Hitman”, which they took off the shelves. Again though, Palladuim specializes in that sort of book, so that anyone who wants the information in “hitman” could just purchase one of the hundreds of similar books they sell.

5

On the one hand, I don’t believe “free speech” oncludes the right to write manuals instructing others on how to break the law.

On the other hand, the “Hitman” books don’t appear to be very effective manuals.

6

We talked about the Paladin Press “Hit Man” case ages ago, in this thread: the First Amendment and “How to murder/steal/etc.”

To recap, here’s the point on which the case truly turned:

That’s from the case. Now, to quote myself from the prior thread:

Also, unless you’re William Kone, you should apologize for stealing his timeline word-for-word. You also appear to have cut-and-pasted the rest from the AP and the Wall Street Journal. You should credit your sources, especially when you’re using such large quantities of their text.

7

Man, we are getting a lot of that these days. Newbys, please be aware that this message board is owned by a newspaper, which takes copyright issues extremely seriously. You may be able to get away with non-attribution other places on the internet (though you shouldn’t do it, even if you can), but you can’t get away with it here.

Sua

8

Ten you’re in for a long fight, because atomic-bomb-making instructions can be found just about anywhere.

The tough part about building a nuclear bomb isn’t in knowing how to build it, it’s in getting the weapons-grade Plutonium or Uranium-235 necessary to make the bomb work.

I suppose you should really aim at censoring detailed instruction manuals on how to build a breeder reactor. :wink:

9

Well, I’m not sure what religion, assembly or right to petition have to do with this debate other than the fact that they are in the 1st amendment.

As for freedom of speech, well, no doesn’t always mean no. The abrigment of speech can and does take place because it’s a simple fact of the law that not everything is protected speech. One must weight the importance of the speech against the government’s interest in censoring it. This goes for everything from shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre to regulating liquor advertisements.

I have heard of the hitman’s case, but I don’t know enough about it to comment on the censorship involved. The obscenity one sounds unconstitutional on its face, but the government could make an argument that riling people up through degrading art would lead to violence and/or mass hysteria.
Me? I wouldn’t buy it, but it’s one of the many arguments the government could make as to why the law should be kept on the books.

10

I disagree. In fact, I think they are part and parcel of free speech: we shouldn’t outlaw behavior out of fear, and so we should also have nothing to fear from free information.

The case was recently played out with a bill that represented an attempt to ban information on making illegal drugs. It failed. Good.

11

I am trully sorry for having quote information without rephrasing it with my own words and for not having included links to the articles I read.
It was not after the movie “Hitman” was shown on TV in my country that I did a sort of research to see if the movie was based on facts or if it was merely fiction. As the cases I mentioned shocked me, I started this thread. I didn’t know that some of these cases had been previously discussed here.
I should have read the forum “About this board” carefully and because of this I apologize. I didn’t have any intention at all to case any harm…
I would like to mention that the same storyline I included in my thread not only can be read in the article called :“The panel” where the name of Mr Kohen is mentioned but also in another article entitled “The Murder of the First Amedment” written by Vanessa McGrady .
I would like to include the urls but I don’t know how to do it without typing http://www. and I don’t want to break another rule…
As I mentioned before, I trully apologize since it was not my intention to use the words of the articles as mine or to make a commercial use of them.

Madelinne

12

I just read the FAQ because I was not sure how to make an hyperlink. In this article The Murder of the First Amendment? you will be able to read the same timeline I included in my thead. Thoug, the name of Mr William Kone is not mentioned as the author of it.
Despite this, my apologies to whoever wrote it.

Madelinne

13

According to this news program the author was a “housewife” who “researched the book by watching detective shows.”

Ban the detective shows! :smiley:

-AmbushBug

14

In most of my email, I include the sig, “Censorship is the most insidious form of hate speech.” IOW, censoring ideas generally treats the speaker as a substandard human, and masks how the target is defamed as such. At least ethnic or religious direct and open ridicule is visible as such and can be challenged openly.

Not all of the 1st Amendment presently exists, while some has changed. The 14th Amendment removed the limitation of religious neutrality (per Lemon 3 prong test) to just Congress in 1868. The Rehnquist black robed lynchmen removed the Free Exercise clause and compelling government interest, least restrictive means “strict scrutiny” test in 1990, in a Native American off the job peyote tradition case (Smith v OR Emp Div).

As to the Miller obscenity test, it might have made good law prior to 14th Amendment equal protections. It came way too late for that, but challenged elitist judges to apply Common Law traditions that education or money exempts one from censorship of the unwashed masses, while obligated to protect equal application of law for all. The court screwed up with the notion of contemporary community standards.

As to Pacifica and indecency, the court should have treated that as equivalent to how Justice Potter Stewart described pornography as in effect evading legal definition because of its nature to evoke arbitrary personal biases and have no uniform meaning. The ACLU compounded the problem in their misrepresented 1996 challenge to only a few limited pieces of Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (aka CDA). Go BarbaraNitke.com in your fight to decensor sexuality! yeah Playboy for US v. Playboy overturning another chunk, and to Marjorie Heins for joining the National Coalition Against Censorhip to champion the “leading coalition of scholars” Amicus on dysphoria that helped win that case for Playboy.
I have seen a band recklessly incite a crowd toward riot and serious public safety hazards, which IMHO is akin to shouting “fire” without evidence of one and outside dramatic action. (Note, judges often get it wrong that we have a right to yell WHATEVER THE FUCK WE PLEASE, and that prior restraint on that right would be onerous. However, we can be penalized after the fact if our speech per se causes serious harm outside what’s protected as a matter of right.)

As to the notion of banning books that delineate how to break the law, would that include government statutes? How about IRS Code, which is so contradiction laden that following certain instructions for compliance involves violating other provisions?

How about religious texts, which may advocate practices contrary to statute, but simultaneously entitled to exemption as a matter of rights? Our legal system is out of control with inherently illegally discriminatory mala prohibita, which in their controls on speech, nudity, sexuality, spiritual and self medicinal substances, or often zoning and land use, make “guides to breaking the law” include discussions of political or judicial actions intended to do no more than attempt to protect legal rights or challenge defective laws that should never exist.

Besides, if I were a mad bomber, I’d fear the flaws in an anarchists cookbook. Give me a Chemical Rubber Publishing Handbook of Chemistry and Physics plus some industrial lab arts referernces any day.

Science and industry CANNOT advance without open access to information potentially useful to perpetrate pretty serious crimes. That’s why law on information is rightfully little different that laws on hammers. Sure, I can punch holes in a skull, but unless there’s proof I’ve done so, it has to be presumed I need to drive a nail now and then, or peen a rivet, or work some masonry, or drive a drift pin, or just like to smash windows and walls (which remodel contractors pay people to do).
Given our perverse laws, even perpetrating arguable felonies is legal. If censorware is used illegally in government venues, we should thank Bennett and Waldo and that middle aged geek female (what’s her name?) for hacking the CyberPatrol blacklist of political, religious, and ethnic discrimination. So what if that may fall outside Fair Use, if it’s essential to challenge illegal acts by government? Don’t sell the product for illegal uses if the vendor doesn’t want FOIA style disclosure.

And what of hacking tools? Is there any difference in the tool kit of a network administrator dealing with issues of sloppy workers and adverse circumstances terminations than there is for the same tools used with criminal intent?
Plenty of bad law to go around…

15

What about the abolitionists? I’m sure they had manuals on how to house run away slaves, which was against the law at the time.

16

One of the tests for restricting speech is whether or not restricting said speech will have the intended effect of preventing an action. If you make it illegal to write an instruction manual on how to freebase cocaine or build a bomb, are you going to keep everyone from making crack or making a bomb? No.

17

:smack: Oh dear…it’s too late…
Oh well…Then I guess I don’t think much else should be censored…

18

Information on how to make bombs is readily available— from the U.S Government, in fact. There are publicly available army manuals (little black books) on explosives and detonators.

19

The problem with free speech is a prevelant feeling in US society that goes as such…
“I believe in free speech for all, except for _____”

20

I have in my hand here a book published by a company called Desert Publications (a division of something called The Delta Group, Ltd.). The book itself is innocuous enough – The Defensive Shotgun: Techniques and Tactics. However, on the back page of this book is a long list of other books available from Desert Publications. Among the 200 or so titles listed are gems such as the following:[ul][li]Select Fire Uzi Modification Manual[/li][li]Full Auto vol. 1, AR-15 Mod Manual[/li][li]Full Auto vol. 2, Uzi Mod Manual[/li][li]Full Auto vol. 4, Thompson SMG[/li][li]Full Auto vol. 5, M1 carbine to M2[/li][li]Full Auto vol. 7, Bingham AK-22[/li][li]Full Auto vol. 8, M-14A1 and mini-14[/li][li]How to Build Silencers[/li][li]The Silencer Cookbook[/li][li]Lock Picking Simplified[/li][li]Improvised Lock Picks[/li][li]Techniques of Safe & Vault Munipulation [sic][/li][li]Fitting Keys by Reading Locks[/li][li]How to Open Handcuffs Without Keys[/li][li]The Butane Lighter Hand Grenade[/li][li]Improvised Munitions Black Book, vol. 1-3[/li][li]Improvised Munitions/Ammonium Nitrate[/li][li]Improvised Shaped Charges[/li][li]Invisible Weapons/Modern Ninja[/li][li]How to Build a Beer Can Morter [sic][/li][li]Boobytraps[/li][li]Terrorist Explosives Handbook[/li][li]Improvised Weapons of the American Underground[/li][li]Training Handbook of the American Underground[/li][li]Science of Revolutionary Warfare[/li][li]Vigilante Handbook[/li][li]Sniper Training[/li][li]Cheating at Cards[/li][li]How to Build a Junkyard Still[/ul]Many of these look like recipie books for breaking the law – although the quality of advice that might be found between their covers is anyone’s guess. (I’ll bet you that folks who can’t be bothered to spell “Mortar” correctly probably didn’t do much field testing to make sure their beer can “morter” was actually useful.)[/li]
I should also mention that this book list also contained a book titled “Homeopathic First Aid,” which sounds even more criminal than all the rest of their titles combined.

21

And of course, my response to their book titles wouldn’t have been quite so ironic had I not spelled a certain word as “recipie”. :smack: