I recently learned of the case of Vikram Buddhi, a foreign doctoral student at Purdue who went on the Yahoo Finance message board in 2005 and posted messages expressing the opinion that Iraqis should do harm to certain high officials of the U.S. government and members of their families.
The New Republic has a story on it, taking the line that this is merely an issue of the diplomatic relationship between the United States and India.
However, I think that this article entirely misses the point. Buddhi was convicted of violations of 18 U.S.C. § 871 (“Threats against the President and Successors to the Presidency”) solely on the basis of what can only be characterized as rants or flames on a message board and sentenced to almost five years’ imprisonment. Seriously, these posts are a joke, and the type of thing you see routinely on the internet every day.
I must admit, this shakes me up quite a bit, to the extent that although I have copies of his posts in front of me, I hesitate to put them in my OP. Copies of the relevant documents are available from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana. Where am I? What place is this?
The snippets of his ‘rant’ that I could find explicitly called for people to commit specific crimes. That is illegal. I don’t know the other details of the case, but his statements are prima facie evidence of a crime. He had numerous other ways to state his opinions without doing so in a criminal manner. Speech used to commit crimes is not protected by the Constitution. How would you distinquish between someone using a message board to organize a terrorist attack and a rant or flame?
If by “expressing your views” you means threats of death and encouraging others to kill someone while within the political boundaries of the area you wish this activity take place, I can’t recall any time in US history when this has not been considered a criminal act.
Is is your assertion that these expressions are protected speech?
No, you can’t go to prison for “nothing more” than expressing your views on a message board. But you can go to prison for threatening the life of the president, whether in spoken word or written word.
You didn’t cite the posts, so we don’t know how to evaluate if they were “a joke” or not. Your link only provides a summary of the article, unless you are a subscriber.
If these are colorable as genuine threats, then it happens a million times a day and thousands of people should be in prison. They’re nothing more than “Iraqis should rape and kill Y and their relatives and they would be justified in doing so!” In no reasonable way can they be viewed as a reasonable threat to someone’s life or as a specific call for anyone in particular to engage in any reasonably specific series of acts.
These statements are nothing more than the expression of (intemperate) political views. To characterize them as any kind of realistic threat in and of themselves is ludicrous and really makes me think twice about our commitment to freedom of expression.
So far as I know, there was no evidence against Buddhi aside from the content of the posts. If I’m wrong about that, then that would change the picture considerably.
I would agree, as a layman, that the posts in the link from **TriPolar **look like rantings, and not a real threat. But I’d need to see all the evidence that the jury had access to, or at least the part that convinced 12 people this guy was guilty. What we saw in that link was a “snippet”.
“… the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444, 447 (U.S. 1969).
According to the site that TriPolar linked to, Buddhi specifically included words like “soon” and “now” that didn’t just advocate possible violent action or violent action one day, but immediate violent action. The only real question is whether his posts were likely to incite or lead to the violence he calls for.
The fact that these calls for imminent violent action are on a message board doesn’t mean that they should be summarily dismissed and not taken seriously. Per this
[quoted AP story]
(http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=18742), the federal indictment alleged that Buddhi used the accounts of other Purdue students to make these posts, but they were tracked to his account with the help of Purdue administrators. A federal jury apparently believed his posts were likely to lead to the type of violence, which included bombings, that he called for.
Do you object to his conviction only or to his arrest?
Most people can post on a board without threatening anyone. And it is hard to tell just from a post if a person is serious or not. If someone ranted about wanting to shoot the president to impress an actress he had never met, most of us would think it was a harmless kook. But sometimes the guy may not be.
I agree with John about needing to see the trial transcript. I have a hard time thinking a prosecutor would want to spend the time and money to prosecute a guy who got pissed one day and posted a few messages. Was this a continuing thing? Was there some sort of planning or additional attempts at the incitement of violence?
What if he was communicating with people intending to carry out those acts? The threats are explicit, and the crime lies in his belief that someone will carry them out.
Whether they are realistic isn’t clear from the statements. Other factors would determine that.
I agree with you, and hate sounding like I’m defending the government in cases like this. But the OP stated that these statements 'can only be characterized as rants or flames on a message board '. I disagree with that based on the quotes I found. I could only find the site I posted above and only have those snippets to work with though. I would assume the government has been heavy handed in this case and wasted our tax dollars again. This is probably complicated because the ‘ranter’ is not a US citizen and someone was afraid that if he went back to India he would engage in active terrorism. Of course now we’ve made that more likely unless we keep him imprisoned until he dies.
Let’s see…a foreign national, in this country on a student visa, threatens violence against the President and others and is sent to prison for it. A jury examined the evidence and found him guilty. Barring some missed information, I say fuck him. He isn’t above the law. If anything, you’d think that when you are in another country, you refrain from openly and vocally calling for the death of its leaders. Let him rot for stupidity if nothing else.
I’m not sure that I’m comfortable with the idea that foreigners should feel like they should keep their heads down lest the gestapo come and drag them away.
"Views of their government’ is not what is at issue here. While you might not want to express your “views of their government” when in Malaysia, anyone legally in the US should be able to express those views. It’s the issue of threatening violence that is at the core of this case. Assuming he did credibly threaten violence, that’s not just a “view”.
My point isn’t that this guy was innocent. My point was that some of the sentiments prior to mine were going a fair bit further on the “don’t try out that free speech thing” - taking it beyond where I was comfortable with it.