For your listening enjoyment. (The Last Supper was a Passover feast, so it just works™, and that film’s absolute cinema)
On Thursday, we covered Elonis v. United States, 575 U.S. 723 (2015). Our protagonist is one Anthony Douglas “Tone Dougie”- not making that up- Elonis. Fun fact: Elonis is from the Bethlehem area and worked at Dorney Park. I try to refrain from profanity on this blog in the interest of looking good to future employers, but I swore an oath at the end of orientation, and in the spirit of that oath and in the candor which will be required of me while practicing law: he’s a real piece of shit. Elonis’ wife, who had been with him for around seven years, left him and took the kids for reasons that should soon become apparent.
Elonis did not handle this very well.
He rebranded himself as “Tone Dougie,” rapper extraordinaire, a real spiritual lyrical miracle individual who would bring real hip-hop back. These bars speak for themselves:
🎵 Fold up your [protection-from-abuse order] and put it in your pocket
Is it thick enough to stop a bullet?
Try to enforce an Order
That was improperly granted in the first place
Me thinks the Judge needs an education
on true threat jurisprudence
And prison time'll add zeros to my settlement...
And if worse comes to worse
I've got enough explosives
to take care of the State Police and the Sheriff's department. 🎵See Elonis, 575 U.S. at 729
Eminem, he certainly ain’t. He’s not even Vanilla Ice, or Jim Carrey’s parody of Vanilla Ice. “Tone Dougie” thought he was cooking, though, and made similar threats against his co-workers at Dorney Park and a kindergarten class (“the most heinous school shooting ever imagined”, in his words, Id.) Shockingly, this caused him legal troubles, troubles that made their way to the SCOTUS. The question is whether it’s sufficient to convict based on how a “reasonable person” would interpret a given communication (e.g., threatening to brutally kill his ex-wife, co-workers, cops, elementary schoolers); what level of mens rea is needed?
Water’s wet, the Pope’s Catholic, and it’s a federal crime to transmit threats over the internet. Generally speaking, one needs to know they’re doing something wrong for it to be criminal. Here, the Supreme Court rejected the “reasonable person” standard used by the lower courts; the jury should have been instructed to consider whether “Tone Dougie” knew he was sending a threat, i.e., his subjective intent. So the Third Circuit’s judgment was reversed and remanded, 8-1 (it was doubting Thomas).
Of course, this wasn’t the end of Our Boy’s™ misadventures. The Third Circuit determined that even a jury given proper instructions would have convicted (Water’s wet, the Pope’s Catholic), so he went away for 3 years and 8 months-ish. Being an idiot, before he got out of the big house, he sent a letter to the prosecutor from the 2011 case, threatening to burn a cross on his lawn and referencing Sandy Hook with a smiley face. He then sent the prosector emails containing porn, gore, and more edgelord references to the Mustache Man and Charles Manson. He sent similar messages to his ex-wife, the one he was convicted of repeatedly threatening to murder, and (somehow) his recent ex-girlfriend. So in 2021, he was convicted yet again, this time of cyberstalking, and is expected to be released at the end of May 2031. After class on Thursday, I got some noodles and began to work on my brief, looking over the sample in the faculty lounge. But as I was waiting for the noodles, all I could think of was how, like, this guy just couldn’t help himself, he had to lash out at everyone who “wronged” him, he had to threaten to shoot up schools and write the lamest bars imaginable. Not even being convicted and going before the Supreme Court was enough to put the idea in his head that he might be in the wrong.
Friday was largely uneventful until D&D that evening. I worked on my brief, mostly; I’m gonna really push tonight to get it done. The session recap can be found elsewhere on this blog; afterward, we watched some Game of Thrones. It was fun, but we only got through one episode (sad!) Saturday, too, was uneventful. More work, but I enjoyed the lovely weather for as long as I could. The sky yesterday was gorgeous.
This morning I went to the gym and did some light exercises: running on the treadmill and striking the punching bag. I noticed last night that my build is now visibly more triangular, and that I need to wear more layers when it gets chilly. I’m proud of having lost so much weight, but I do miss the 50% resistance to frost damage I used to have; I had two sweaters on, it was crazy. My dad came down to Philly to drop off my Easter basket (which was very kind of him). I made some brunch after he left. Since my Lenten fast had concluded, I had some ham (I coated the slices with honey and spices before frying), three eggs sunny-side-up, a short stack of pancakes in maple syrup, and some strawberries on the side. It was delicious.
I don’t talk about it much, but I have a complicated personal relationship with the Almighty. I was raised Catholic, and in some sense I still am (the old Troubles-era joke about whether one’s a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist comes to mind). And I definitely believe in God, at least in a panentheistic sense (following from omnipotence and omnipresence). But if I’m a Catholic, then I’m either very heterodox or very lapsed. I’ve often struggled with the idea of God being merciful. Speaking solely from personal experience (I know, I know, anecdotal and all that), I’ve rarely felt… that. Judgment is all too familiar: I’m being watched, my sins are being tallied up, and my heart is heavier than a feather.
I’m grateful for each new day, though. I don’t know if I’ll be saved. I’m not sure if that question even makes sense. Someone I used to know would ask me for certainty that we’d be aware after death, in Heaven, among those we love and those who love us in return. Sometimes I think everyone’ll be saved, even people like Tone Dougie will be united with God in the end. But is that existence as we, like, conventionally understand it? Other times, I think that this is it, that even if our souls are immortal, a dreamless sleep might as well be death. Neither answer gave them the comfort they sought. I pray they’re right, and that I’m wrong. Sometimes I feel Nanny’s presence when I wear the bracelet containing part of her ashes. Sometimes I see in my mind’s eye a great many points of light surrounding a burning figure with a thousand faces and a thousand arms. I wonder if I’ll be among them one day; if the present is an illusion and all pasts, presents, and futures are happening simultaneously, maybe I already am. But what would that even mean in a practical sense?
With every sunrise comes a new chance to do some good, or at least to rejoice in being alive. I really should seize that chance.
Sierpinski Tetrahedron 