From Eugene Volokh’s blog:
Matthew Hale, a white supremacist leader, was convicted of soliciting for the murder of a federal judge who presided over an earlier trial involving Hale’s organization. Hale was sentenced to 20 years for his murderous designs on the judge. He then published a note on his website about the jury foreperson, titled “The Juror Who Convicted Matt Hale:”
A subsequent post apparently published a photo of the juror as well. Neither post said anything specific about harming Juror A, but the website it was published on was a white supremacy website, and because white supremacists are known for the use of violence against targets of their dislike, Hale was indicted, charged with violating 18 USC § 373, which prohibits harming or attempting to harm a juror based on his exercise of jury service.
This indictment has now been dismissed.
The opinion dismissing the indictment discusses First Amendment law in some detail, including a case called NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware. In Claiborne, the Supreme Court considered a boycott by black citizens of white-owned businesses, with “enforcers,” or “black hats” stationed outside the white-owned businesses noting the names of blacks who violated the boycott. These names were read at meetings of the Claiborne County NAACP and at church services, and published them in a paper entitled the “Black Times” as branded as traitors to the black cause. The boycott leader, Charles Evers, could not be prosecuted, said the Court, despite his statements that “blacks who traded with white merchants would be answerable to him,” that “any ‘uncle toms’ who broke the boycott would ‘have their necks broken’ by their own people,” and “we catch any of you going in any of them racist stores, we’re gonna break your damn neck.”
I, like the blog author, find it rather ironic that the main principle of law now protecting Hale the white supremacist was developed as a result of black civil rights work.
For debate: did the court get it right? Or were they wrong in Claiborne? (I assume no one would take the position that they were right ion Claiborne but wrong here, but who knows…)