Re: Ex-GOP senator's wife pleads to email attack campaign

18 Jun 2001

      Interesting. BTW the state appears to be claiming that they took care of 
the _McIntyre_ problems by rewriting the statute post-decision to only 
apply to pseudonymous/anonymous messages written by someone affiliated with 
a campaign.

So in other words, you could write stuff under a nym, but someone on the 
campaign staff could not.

(Note I'm not saying this makes the statute constitutional, but that it's 
not as broad as it could be.)

-Declan

At 05:15 PM 6/18/01 +0000, robbin stewart wrote:
...
Matt, Declan, thanks for bringing this to my attention.
It's worse than it looks at first.  The prosecutor isn't claiming the 
content of the message was untrue, but that using a "katie" psuedonym was 
the falsity making the messages criminal.
I don't keep up on minnesota politics too well. Was the fall election 
close, and did the publicity around the case have much impact?
It's fairly unusual for an incumbent senator to lose.
I just noticed that this was a -federal- election.  Therefor any minnesota 
statutes on this topic are preempted by the FECA (441a or d or something.)
Arguably, what we have here is a case where the balance of the US Senate 
was shifted because of an illegal conspiracy to violate the civil rights 
of the (future) wife of a senator, by charging her under a statute which 
is unconstitutional as applied to her, as well as probably 
unconstitutional per se, under the minnesota constitution and McIntyre.
[There would also be a malicious prosecution issue.]
I detect the presence of my old nemisis J Bradley King, currently the 
director of the Minn. election division.  I will try to contact Samuelson, 
the ACLU guy mentioned in the article, before assuming the articles cited 
got all the facts right.
As Matt mentioned, I have a small practice based in Indiana which monitors 
and litigates about anonymous election speech on the net.
I would be eager to follow up on this case.
My bottleneck is that I don't have cocounsel for states other than Indiana 
- I welcome solutions to this problem.
More info at http://communities.msn.com/robbinstewart
...
From: Declan McCullagh 
To: Matthew Gaylor 
In-Reply-To>Matt: That's a good point, and I should have highlighted it in 
my article.
No, she's not alleged to have said anything that was untrue. If she did,
Ciersi could have sued for libel rather than relying on the state to 
prosecute.
-Declan
At 01:11 PM 6/15/01 -0400, Matthew Gaylor wrote:
...
Declan McCullagh  wrote:
...
* Gunhus is accused of using a Hotmail account (Katie Stevens --
   kylomb@hotmail.com) to send the disparaging email messages, which
   talked about how Ciresi had represented corporate polluters and
   anti-union companies.
Is what she wrote being alleged to be untrue?  From my perspective
disparaging politicians is like shooting fish in a barrel.  Usually all
that is needed is to truthfully compare their campaign speeches to their
actual voting or other practices.
At 9:48 PM -0400 6/14/01, Declan McCullagh wrote:
...
* And what about the legal risk to free speech? The Minnesota Civil
   Liberties Union reasonably argues that a criminal law that bans
   sending pseudonymous messages is unconstitutional. A Supreme Court
   decision, McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission
   (http://www.epic.org/free_speech/mcintyre.html), says that a
   prohibition on the distribution of anonymous campaign literature
   violates the First Amendment. The state law seems to be ecumenical in
   its application: A Republican has used it to attack the Sierra Club
   (http://www.fcregister.com/ziegler11_6_00.htm).
I'm being represented by attorney Robbin Stewart (Brother of Cypherpunk
Bill Stewart) in an anonymous speech case as we speak. Robin has had
several victories in Indianapolis for anon political speech.  His first
victory was inspired from Freematt's Alerts, Robbin had read some
commentary from my list on McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission that
prompted him to challenge a city ordinance that ordered him to remove a
campaign sign from his residence (The sign didn't have who paid or wrote
it written on it.) The ordinance was overturned in the Indiana Supreme 
Court.
Regards,  Matt-
...
...
Matthew Gaylor, (614) 313-5722  ICQ: 106212065   Archived at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fa/
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