Your right to free speech ends when it endangers my right ...



Your right to free speech ends when it endangers my right to life. You cannot yell “Fire” for the heck of it in a crowded theater. You cannot state that you want someone to die if it can be considered a threat.

While the Internet is seen as the last location for total freedom to act as a fool if being a fool is what you want to do, an act like a student writing and posting “I wish my Principal were dead” can be considered, in this day and age, a threat to the principal’s life. As such, it would well be within the rights of the Principal to have the statement removed from the website and the matter referred to the police or even the Federal Bureau of Investigation, if there were enough reason to have such an involvement. Many cities do not have laws regarding such threats, and some police departments will not act on Internet chatter.

In fact, however, there are “exceptions to the First Amendment: (1) …use Internet websites to incite…, and, (2) the words on the websites and the language… constitute a true threat.”(Boghosian, Heidi and Abby Scher. “First Amendment Blues: Police Tactics Suppress Free Speech. . Updated Winter 07. Accessed 12/2/09.)

In fact, since the website specifically mentioned a very specific individual, it would be similar to the Planned Parenthood v. American Coalition of Life Activists case from 1992, where the website mentioned abortion doctors by name and even crossed out the names of those that had been murdered. (Boghosian and Scher) Such an act makes the posting on the website an actual threat that can be taken to court and can be decided in the Principal’s favor if she wanted to press charges.

In addition to telling the youth to remove it from the site, she would probably be within her power as Principal to have the student suspended or expelled for making a threat to a staff member. However, if the Principal were smart, she would have the district superintendent immediately act by contacting the youth’s parents and pointing out exactly haw far the district would be willing to go to stop this unwarranted threat.

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