The First Amendment and Free Speech.

PRISON SNITCHES
makes you wonder why J's are nowhere to be found in American prisons???
8 minute mark of video


Note: this is simply a OPINION! nothing more, nothing less. Here is the previous post on Hal Turner. The man has some very IMPORTANT First Amendment cases that will settle alot of Free Speech issues once and for all. Everyone should hope that he wins his cases against the Government, because it will affect every American in the future.



http://pencildicksvstheworld.blogspot.com/2009/07/hal-turner-admits-he-was-fbi-informant.html







HAL TURNER

Aug 18 03:51 PM US/Eastern
By KATIE NELSON
Associated Press Writer


HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - A New Jersey blogger facing charges in two states for allegedly making threats against lawmakers and judges was trained by the FBI on how to be deliberately provocative, his attorney said Tuesday.
Hal Turner worked for the FBI from 2002 to 2007 as an "agent provocateur" and was taught by the agency "what he could say that wouldn't be crossing the line," defense attorney Michael Orozco said.


"His job was basically to publish information which would cause other parties to act in a manner which would lead to their arrest," Orozco said.

Prosecutors have acknowledged that Turner was an informant who spied on radical right-wing organizations, but the defense has said Turner was not working for the FBI when he allegedly made threats against Connecticut legislators and wrote that three federal judges in Illinois deserved to die.

"But if you compare anything that he did say when he was operating, there was no difference. No difference whatsoever," Orozco said.

Special Agent Ross Rice, a spokesman for the FBI in Chicago, said he would not comment on or even confirm Turner's relationship with the FBI.

Orozco spoke to reporters after a court hearing in Hartford on Tuesday. Turner, 47, of North Bergen, N.J., did not appear, because he is in federal custody in Illinois. His arraignment on the Connecticut charges was rescheduled to Oct. 19.

In June, Turner urged his readers to "take up arms" against Connecticut lawmakers and suggested government officials should "obey the Constitution or die," because he was angry over legislation—later withdrawn—that would have given lay members of Roman Catholic churches more control over their parish's finances.

He wrote in Internet postings the same month that the Illinois federal appeals judges "deserve to be killed" because they issued a ruling that upheld ordinances in Chicago and suburban Oak Park banning handguns. He included their photos and the room numbers of their chambers at the courthouse.

Orozco officially joined Turner's defense team in the Connecticut case on Tuesday, with approval from Superior Court Judge David Gold. Orozco said his Newark, N.J.-based firm has been representing Turner for the past five years, including during his FBI informant years.

Turner's Connecticut attorney, Matthew R. Potter, said it's too early to tell which trial will move forward first. Orozco said he plans First Amendment defenses in both cases.

Randall Samborn, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago, said the office would not comment on Orozco's statements.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


Story link below

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9A5GCC80&show_article=1


Here is what the LA Times(a liberal rag) of all papers said about the First Amendment.

THE GOVERNMENT VS. HAL TURNER

Editorial

The government versus Hal Turner
As vile as his rhetoric is, the right-wing extremist's odious online views deserve 1st Amendment protections.
August 22, 2009
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In bringing criminal charges against an Internet radio host and blogger who wrote that three judges "deserve to be killed" for their ruling in a 2nd Amendment case, the U.S. Justice Department isn't risking much public criticism. But the prosecution of the despicable Hal Turner looks like an attempt to punish speech, not action.

Turner long has ranted against public officials and others who don't share his right-wing views; his rhetoric is so vile and his manner so confrontational that they border on incitement of violence. But under the 1st Amendment, "bordering on incitement" isn't enough to justify punishment. In 1969, the court overturned the conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader who had urged "revengeance" against the government for suppressing the white race. The court ruled that advocating the use of force couldn't be punished "except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."

Why should the 1st Amendment protect someone who publicly says that a politician or judge or doctor should be killed? Two reasons: Such statements are often hyperbole, and even statements that include an endorsement of violence can serve the purpose of communicating outrage about public policies.

The "imminent lawless action" standard has been applied inconsistently. In 2002, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a civil judgment against antiabortion activists who posted online a list of abortion doctors with lines drawn through the names of those who had been killed or wounded. (Similarly, Turner, who last year publicly relished the idea of violence against editors of this newspaper, posted the photos and office addresses of the judges.)

Perhaps prosecutors will present evidence that Turner's outrageous comments about the judges were intended or likely to produce imminent violence against them. If so, Turner's conviction might be warranted. But the government's complaint is not persuasive.

In pursuing this and similar prosecutions, the Justice Department should remember the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in a famous 1919 case: "I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country."



Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-incitement22-2009aug22,0,1500548.story


What are the Historical Supreme Court Cases





Overview >
By Jarrod F. Reich
Contributing writer

The U.S. Supreme Court has yet to address the issue of hate speech on the Internet. Nor have many federal or state courts ruled on the issue. But it is important to remember that the courts’ rulings in other hate-speech cases are still controlling for future hate-speech cases no matter in which medium they occur, including the Internet.

To borrow from the late Justice Potter Stewart’s remark about obscenity, we may not be able to describe or classify hate speech accurately, but “we know it when we see it.” Mainstream America collectively shudders when it hears racial, anti-Semitic, homophobic, or other derogatory comments aimed at racial or religious minorities or other groups, but the question is: Can we stop it without stepping on people’s First Amendment rights? Even if so, how could it be stopped on the Internet?

Some have argued that racial and ethnic epithets are types of speech that, like “fighting words” (as articulated in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire in 1942), seem to have “no redeeming value,” can incite violent retaliation, and thus should not enjoy First Amendment protection and can be regulated with no risk of infringing First Amendment rights.

But who decides what is offensive and, moreover, what is offensive enough to be called “hate speech”? Could legislation be drafted that would adequately bar hate speech without being either underinclusive (still allowing some hateful speech) or overbroad (banning protected speech)?

The Supreme Court has not been extremely receptive to hate speech regulation. It has said that such regulation should be “strictly scrutinized” to ensure that it does not prohibit protected speech.

The legacy of the Chaplinsky “fighting words” doctrine as it might be applied to hate speech has evolved into a “speech” vs. “action” dichotomy, as discussed in the following four cases.

Brandenburg v. Ohio: In this 1969 case, the Court explained its modern incitement test, whereby speech does not create the classic “clear and present danger” to citizens unless it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” The case centered around a videotaped and broadcast news piece on an Ohio Ku Klux Klan rally, wherein the viewer could hear racial and anti-Semitic epithets (such as “Freedom for the whites” and “Send the Jews back to Israel”) uttered in the background of the newscast. Although not a “hate speech” case per se (it dealt with an alleged violation of a state criminal syndicalism statute), Brandenburg’s per curiam opinion (all justices writing the opinion in agreement together) made clear that for non-obscene speech to be proscribed by the First Amendment, it must lead to “imminent lawless action.” The Court ruled there was no such imminence in Brandenburg because the epithets were spoken at an earlier time than they were received by its audience because of the television broadcast.

National Socialist Party v. Skokie: This famous 1977 case centered on the efforts of residents of the predominantly Jewish town of Skokie, Ill., to prevent the National Socialist of Nazi Party from holding a planned demonstration there. The Supreme Court denied the residents’ attempts to block the march, because to do so, it said, “albeit reluctantly,” would suppress the Nazis’ First Amendment rights. Said the Court: “[A]nticipation of a hostile audience [cannot] justify the prior restraint ... . [I]t is [the] burden of [Skokie residents] to avoid the [offensive march] if they can do so without unreasonable inconvenience.” The Court held, then, that the speech itself, although hateful, could be avoided.

R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul: In this 1992 case, the city of St. Paul, Minn., enacted an ordinance that banned the placing on public or private property “a symbol, object, appellation, characterization or graffiti, including, but not limited to, a burning cross or Nazi swastika, which one knows or has reasonable grounds to know arouses anger, alarm, or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, or gender.” The plaintiff in this case was arrested for violating this ordinance by placing a burning cross on the front lawn of an African-American family’s house. The Court held the ordinance invalid because it was both overbroad and inderinclusive, and that it even went so far as to constitute viewpoint discrimination. The Court reasoned that “the First Amendment does not permit [a government] to impose special prohibitions on those speakers who express views on disfavored subjects.” The Court considered that it was overbroad in that any such speech used by “proponents of all views” whatever its context would be prohibited. It was underinclusive in that it did not proscribe all fighting words — homophobic epithets and “aspersions about one’s mother” would be allowed under the statute. The Court therefore suggested in this case that any anti-hate crime statute would be presumed unconstitutional and therefore be strictly scrutinized on the grounds that it would be underinclusive, overbroad, and/or constituting viewpoint discrimination.

Wisconsin v. Mitchell: The Supreme Court solidified a speech/action distinction in this 1993 case. The case concerned black youths who had been convicted under a hate-crime statute after severely beating a white person because they were incensed by racist depictions of the movie “Mississippi Burning,” which they had watched. The Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned the convictions on the basis of R.A.V., because their actions constituted “offensive [yet protected] thought.” The Supreme Court reversed the state decision, saying that there was a difference between speech and conduct. “Whereas the ordinance struck down in R.A.V. was explicitly directed at expression (i.e., “speech” or “messages”), the statute in this case is aimed at conduct unprotected by the First Amendment,” the high court said.

The Mitchell court thus seemed to suggest that “hate speech” remains a conundrum: The only way it can be prohibited is if the statute that does so is “content-neutral” — yet the point of proscribing hate speech in the first place is to proscribe the content of the speech.

Perhaps the seminal case on the speech-conduct distinction vis a vis the Internet is Planned Parenthood of the Columbia/Willamette, Inc. v. American Coalition of Life Activists.

This 2001 case involved the “Nuremberg Files” Web site run by the American Coalition of Life Activists. The names and home addresses of abortion doctors were posted on the site, then crossed out or turned gray if the doctors were killed or wounded by anti-abortion zealots. The “Nuremberg Files” site did not explicitly threaten the doctors, but the ACLA lauded and perhaps encouraged the killings.

Some of the doctors whose names appeared on the list sued the ACLA on grounds that, among other things, the speech on the Web site “robbed the doctors of their anonymity and gave violent anti-abortion activists the information to find them” and praised the slaying/injuring of the doctors on the list. The doctors said this speech hurt them in that it constituted “true threats” against them.

Although not a “hate speech” case per se, the case sheds some light on how courts may handle such a case in the future. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit held that the ACLA’s speech on the Web site was constitutionally protected by the First Amendment. The court said that there was no “imminence” as required since Brandenburg to prove a danger, and that “advocating illegal action at some indefinite future time is protected [by the First Amendment]. If the First Amendment protects speech advocating violence, then it must also protect speech that does not advocate violence but still makes it more likely,” the 9th Circuit court said.

Further, the court noted that the ACLA did not urge its members to commit the violence or have anyone commit the violence on the ACLA’s behalf. “While pungent, even highly offensive, ACLA’s statements carefully avoided threatening the doctors with harm in the sense that there are no ‘quotable quotes’ calling for violence,” the court held. A generalized implied threat (by giving those who would commit heinous acts the information required for committing them), the court said, could not be suppressed without violating the First Amendment.

The “Nuremberg Files” site, the 9th Circuit concluded, “cannot fairly be read as calling for future violence against several hundred other doctors, politicians, judges, and celebrities on the list; otherwise any statement approving past violence could automatically be construed as calling for future violence.”




http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/speech/internet/topic.aspx?topic=internet_hate_speech

YES, OUR PRECIOUS FIRST AMENDMENT

http://www.anarchytv.com/speech/cases.html

THE FIRST AMENDMENT OF THE U.S. CONSTITUTION

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights.html


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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.