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

[Declan McCullagh]

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 <declan at well.com>
>>To: Matthew Gaylor <freematt at coil.com>
>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 <declan at well.com> wrote:
>>>>  * Gunhus is accused of using a Hotmail account (Katie Stevens --
>>>>    kylomb at 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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