United States v. Dennis Sryniawski, No. 21-3487 (8th Cir. 2022)
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Defendant was charged with federal offenses of cyberstalking and extortion after he sent a series of e-mails to a candidate for the Nebraska legislature. A jury acquitted Defendant of extortion but convicted him of cyberstalking. Defendant appealed the conviction, arguing that the e-mails constituted speech that is protected by the First Amendment, and that the evidence was insufficient to support a conviction.
The Eighth Circuit concluded that the evidence was insufficient under a proper interpretation of the cyberstalking statute, and therefore reversed the conviction. The court explained that to qualify as speech integral to criminal conduct, the speech must be integral to conduct that constitutes another offense that does not involve protected speech, such as antitrust conspiracy, extortion, or in-person harassment. In this case, however, the jury acquitted Defendant of extortion, and there is no other identified criminal conduct to which the jury could have found that Defendant’s e-mail communications were integral.
Further, under prevailing law, where an alleged victim of defamation is a public figure, a speaker’s assertions are unprotected speech only if the speaker acted with “actual malice”—that is, with the knowledge that his statements were false or with reckless disregard of their falsity. Here, on this record, the evidence is insufficient to support a finding that Defendant harassed the relevant parties with defamatory speech. Finally, the government did not charge Defendant with the separate offense of transmitting obscene materials via the internet and its belated obscenity theory is insufficient to sustain the cyberstalking conviction.
Court Description: [Colloton, Author, with Smith, Chief Judge, and Shepherd, Circuit Judge] Criminal case - Criminal law. When the federal cyberstalking statute - 18 U.S.C. Sec. 2261A(2)(B) - is interpreted in a way consonant with the First Amendment, the evidence was not sufficient to support defendant's conviction for cyberstalking; the First Amendment's Free Speech Clause prohibits Congress from punishing political speech intended to harass or intimidate in the broad sense of those words; for this reason, the statute cannot be applied constitutionally to a defendant who, like this defendant, directs speech on a matter of public concern to a political candidate with intent merely to trouble or annoy the candidate; the government does not maintain that the emails defendant sent contained a true threat to the candidate or his family, and its arguments that three categories of harassing speech are unprotected - speech integral to criminal conduct, defamatory speech and obscenity - are not sufficient to support the conviction given this record. [ September 01, 2022 ]
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