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COUNTERMAN v. COLORADO 

Syllabus 

speech in a few limited areas.  Among these historic and traditional
categories of unprotected expression is true threats.  True threats are 
“serious expression[s]” conveying that a speaker means to “commit an 
act of unlawful violence.”  Virginia v. Black, 538 U. S. 343, 359.  The 
existence of a threat depends not on “the mental state of the author,” 
but  on  “what  the  statement  conveys”  to  the  person  on  the  receiving 
end.  Elonis v. United States, 575 U. S. 723, 733.  Yet the First Amend-
ment may still demand a subjective mental-state requirement shield-
ing some true threats from liability.  That is because bans on speech 
have the potential to chill, or deter, speech outside their boundaries.
An important tool to prevent that outcome is to condition liability on 
the State’s showing of a culpable mental state.  Speiser v. Randall, 357 
U. S.  513,  526.    That  kind  of  “strategic  protection”  features  in  this 
Court’s precedent concerning the most prominent categories of unpro-
tected speech.  Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U. S. 323, 342.  With 
regard to defamation, a public figure cannot recover for the injury such
a statement causes unless the speaker acted with “knowledge that it 
was  false  or  with  reckless  disregard  of  whether  it  was  false  or  not.” 
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U. S. 254, 280.  The same idea 
arises in the law respecting obscenity and incitement to unlawful con-
duct.  See, e.g., Hess v. Indiana, 414 U. S. 105, 109; Hamling v. United 
States, 418 U. S. 87, 122–123.  And that same reasoning counsels in 
favor  of  requiring  a  subjective  element  in  a  true-threats  case.    A 
speaker’s fear of mistaking whether a statement is a threat, fear of the
legal system getting that judgment wrong, and fear of incurring legal 
costs all may lead a speaker to swallow words that are in fact not true
threats.    Insistence  on  a  subjective  element  in  unprotected-speech 
cases, no doubt, has a cost: Even as it lessens chill of protected speech, 
it makes prosecution of otherwise proscribable, and often dangerous, 
communications harder.  But a subjective standard is still required for 
true threats, lest prosecutions chill too much protected, non-threaten-
ing expression.  Pp. 5–10.

(b)  In this context, a recklessness standard—i.e., a showing that a 
person “consciously disregard[ed] a substantial [and unjustifiable] risk
that  [his]  conduct  will  cause  harm  to  another,”  Voisine  v.  United 
States,  579  U. S.  686,  691—is  the  appropriate  mens  rea.  Requiring
purpose or knowledge would make it harder for States to counter true
threats—with  diminished  returns  for  protected  expression.    Using  a 
recklessness standard also fits with this Court’s defamation decisions, 
which adopted a recklessness rule more than a half-century ago.  The 
Court sees no reason to offer greater insulation to threats than to def-
amation.  While this Court’s incitement decisions demand more, the 
reason for that demand—the need to protect from legal sanction the