Category Archives: First Amendment

November 4, 2014 12:00 AM Share with others:

By P.J. DAnnunzio / The Legal Intelligencer

The Commonwealth Court has ruled in an apparent issue of first impression that reporting a convicted sex offenders Internet aliases under Megans Law IV would not violate his First Amendment rights.

The decision from a seven-judge Commonwealth Court panel came in response to Richard Coppolinos request to be removed from the sex offender registry. The en banc panel rejected his argument that being required to disclose his Internet identities infringes on his right to anonymous free speech.

Coppolino asserted that since he was convicted and completed his sentence before Megans Law IV was enacted, having to comply with certain provisions of the law constituted retroactive punishment.

Coppolino, convicted of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, also argued that the provision of Megans Law requiring the reporting of Internet names designed to protect minors was overbroad in the context of his case because his crime did not involve a minor or the Internet, Judge Renee Cohn Jubelirer wrote in the courts opinion.

Judge Jubelirer said under Megans Law, any of Coppolinos Internet identifiers must be included on a statewide sex-offender registry. She added that registry information is disseminated in four ways: among law enforcement agencies; for the purposes of notifying victims and communities; and on a public website.

Because none of the avenues of dissemination of registry information applicable in this case involve disclosure of registrants Internet identifiers, we conclude that the requirement that registrants disclose their Internet identifiers does not burden the right to anonymous speech. Because this provision does not burden a registrants First Amendment rights, it is not overbroad, Judge Jubelirer said.

(Copies of the 52-page opinion in Coppolino v. Noonan, PICS No. 14-1628, are available from The Legal Intelligencer. Please call the Pennsylvania Instant Case Service at 1-800-276-PICS to order or for information.)

P.J. DAnnunzio can be contacted at 1-215-557-2315 or pdannunzio@alm.com. Follow him on Twitter @PJDannunzioTLI.

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Sex offender must register Web IDs under Megans Law

Trevor Brookins

*Based on ones perspective either the first or the second amendment is the most important part of the Constitution. Either it is more important to have something to protect or something to help you protect it.

I will save that debate for another day and skip ahead to which of the five freedoms included in the first amendment is most important. And why were assembly, petition, press, religion, and speech chosen to be the basis of freedom in our country.

Well simply put if you are trying to break away from an absolute monarchy in which the allegiance to the crown meant allegiance to the king as Gods emissary on earth, those five things would have been essential. Being able to speak against some religious action the king took, among others who are like minded, or being able to print your thoughts to gain a larger audience, and ask the king to change are all the things that would get you killed or put in prison if you were lucky.

But if I am to borrow from George Carlin some of these are a bit redundant. The freedom of speech is important as it is the basis of autonomy. But the freedom of assembly is basically the freedom to speak among others; the freedom of the press is the freedom to have your speech distributed; the freedom of petition is basically the freedom to speak to the government without repercussions. The freedom of religion is also a specific kind of autonomy but it is different in that it may or may not involve others.

Put another way: speech without an audience becomes less important while religion without an audience maintains its power. Thus we are left with speech versus religion.

While I just spent a paragraph arguing for the centrality of speech as the basis of a free society because of the many different forms it takes, I actually believe religion is an even more important freedom because of its history of empowering people and inspiring actions. Religion at its core is a belief system that gets groups of people on the same page and pulling in the same direction. This is not necessarily the case with speech. While it may not be true there is a reason for the thought that organized religion has been the source of more violence and death than anything else in history. The kernel of veracity is that throughout the history of Western civilization organized religion has often been the reason people are killing others.

Furthermore religion can inspire speech and all of its derivatives (press, assembly, and petition). Religion makes use of speech in a way that is not reciprocal enhancing the case for religion to be a more basic freedom than speech.

Lastly think back to your elementary Social Studies lessons. Why did the Pilgrims come to the New World freedom of speech or freedom of religion? Religion. The freedom to worship God in a manner of ones own choosing has always been at the center of the American experiment, first as colonies then as a country.

For these reasons religion stands out as the most essential freedom contained in the first amendment. Unfortunately many people misunderstand this freedom to exclude non-Christian forms of religion. My only response to people with that perspective is that while the people who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were certainly predominately Christian it is instructive that they left out any mention of their personal religious beliefs out of the countrys rule book. Basically the felt strongly enough about the freedom of religion that they left that issue open so that other denominations of Christian and even other religions not yet incorporated into the country could come and feel welcome.

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The Socialists Journal: Number One of Number One

US Approved Ferguson No fly Area to BLOCK MEDIA
Clear Violation of First Amendment by US officials! ~ jman Click Show More to Read More: WASHINGTON (AP) The U.S. government agreed to a police request to restrict more than 37 square...

By: JmanPrepper WontBeSilenced

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US Approved Ferguson No fly Area to BLOCK MEDIA - Video

Clayton County Ga.First Amendment Audit
Clayton County Georgia First Amendment Audit. We as citizens have a first amendment protected right to document what public officials do on our behalf and at our expense. However law enforcement...

By: HONORYOUROATH

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Clayton County Ga.First Amendment Audit - Video

(Feature) Seminole County First Amendment Audit
Florida horror school alumnus recalls bloody beatings after discovery of skeletal remains ...

By: HONORYOUROATH

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(Feature) Seminole County First Amendment Audit - Video

Amy Gajdas new book overstates the threat to press freedom in digital-age court rulings

The First Amendment Bubble: How Privacy and Paparazzi Threaten a Free Press By Amy Gajda

Harvard University Press 306 pages; $35

In late August, someone anonymously posted hacked nude photographs of the actress Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities on an internet bulletin board. Celebrity blogger Perez Hilton posted the photos on his gossip website. Shortly afterward, buffeted by angry social-media responses and the specter of litigation, Hilton apologized and took them down.

Any second-year law student could concoct a legal defense to an invasion of privacy claim by Lawrence: These are truthful images of a public figure who has courted public attention worldwide. Hilton broke no laws; he simply showed images made public by others, heightening awareness of the important controversy over internet privacy.

Its not a good defense, though. I think a court could reject it without doing damage to the First Amendment. Amy Gajda, a former broadcast journalist turned law professor, would probably agree. But she also would worry that more cases like this one would, in time, erode freedoms for serious journalism.

The Lawrence flap occurred too late to be included in The First Amendment Bubble: How Privacy and Paparazzi Threaten a Free Press. The book begins with an account of a video posted on Gawker in 2012 of the professional wrestler Hulk Hogan in a private sexual encounter. A Florida state trial judge ordered Gawker to take it down, showing, in Gajdas words, a new willingness to limit public disclosure of truthful information.

The federal courts quickly stepped in to reverse this result, she notes; the Hogan tape, in all its glory, remains available online today. So the courts new willingness might more properly be called ambivalence. Gajda nonetheless believes that the new willingness is growing stronger, and that the obtuseness of mainstream media outlets runs the risk of making things worse. [T]here seems to be a modern-age shift back toward 1890s sensibilities, she writes. [C]ourts are signaling a new sensitivity to threats to privacy posed by evolving social and cultural conditions.

Gajda succumbs to the tendency to see even minor slights to press freedom as omens of onrushing dystopia.

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How the First Amendment applies to Jennifer Lawrence

ATTENTION PSA FIRST AMENDMENT

By: natedegroff

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ATTENTION PSA FIRST AMENDMENT - Video

(Open Records Project) Seminole County First Amendment Audit
Florida horror school alumnus recalls bloody beatings after discovery of skeletal remains http://www.nydailynews.com/news/natio... The Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna gained a...

By: HONORYOUROATH

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(Open Records Project) Seminole County First Amendment Audit - Video

The Founding Fathers of the United States believed that the rights of the people were granted by God and not by government. These basic God given rights were embodied in the United States Constitution and, the most basic of these rights, were set out in the First Amendment. Our most basic rights are the right of speech, the right of religion and the right of free assembly.

Over the past 25 years, there has been a war waged on religion and that war is being waged, primarily, against Christians and the Christian church. In the most recent attack, the elected officials in the city of Houston, Texas, violated the First Amendment rights of several Houston churches, pastors and congregations because these pastors, churches and congregations disagreed with a new Houston ordinance requiring that all restrooms in all businesses in the city of Houston be gender-neutral. Apparently, the Houston mayor and city council believe that pastors, churches and congregations can speak freely so long as they agree with the city council.

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Our First Amendment rights

The New Hampshire ACLU has filed a lawsuit that challenges the states ban on sharing photos of completed ballots aka ballot selfies charging that the law violates the first amendment.

There is no more potent way to communicate ones support for a candidate than to voluntarily display a photograph of ones marked ballot depicting ones vote for that candidate, the lawsuit reads.

New Hampshire has long had a law on its books banning voters from taking photos of their ballot, theoretically as a way to stop people from selling their vote. In June, the law was updated to explicitly outlaw taking a digital image or photograph of his or her marked ballot and distributing or sharing the image via social media. Violators can be punished up to $1000.

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(Massachusetts has a similar anti-ballot selfie law on its books, although it rarely if ever has been enforced.)

The law went into place Sept. 1 before the New Hampshires primary elections, and at least three people have already been investigated by the states attorney general for sharing photos of their ballot on Twitter and Facebook. One of those photo-takers, former police officer Andrew Langlois, shared a picture of his ballot in which he wrote-in the name of his deceased dog Akira as his Republican choice for the US Senate.

Another violator, state Representative Leon Rideout of Lancaster, took a ballot selfie and shared it to Twitter to make a statement, he told the Nashua Telegraph.

Langlois, Rideout, and another politician are named as plaintiffs in the ACLU lawsuit, which argues that their ballot selfies were political speech and therefore protected by the first amendment.

What this law ignores is that displaying a photograph of a marked ballot on the Internet is a powerful form of political speech that conveys various constitutionally-protected messages that have no relationship to vote buying or voter coercion, the lawsuit reads.

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New Hampshire ACLU Files Lawsuit to Make Ballot Selfies Legal