Opinion ID: 3066175
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: B.’s co-workers.

Text: The text messages, emails, and Facebook page constitute speech that, considered in isolation, might have been entitled to First Amendment protection. I say “might” because the notion that any of Osinger’s speech should receive full First Amendment protection is certainly debatable. The text messages quoted above were sent only to V.B., an unwilling listener, with no apparent purpose other than to harass or frighten her. See Eugene Volokh, One-to-One Speech vs. One-to-Many Speech, Criminal Harassment Laws, and “Cyberstalking,” 107 Nw. U. L. Rev. 731, 742–43 (2013). They formed part of the basis for Osinger’s prosecution not because of any expressive idea they communicated, see Saxe v. State Coll. Area Sch. Dist., 240 F.3d 200, 208 (3d Cir. 30 UNITED STATES V. OSINGER 2001), but rather because of the “implicit threat of conduct” they contained. Rodriguez v. Maricopa Cnty. Cmty. Coll. Dist., 605 F.3d 703, 710 (9th Cir. 2010). Still, there is no categorical exception to the First Amendment for harassing or offensive speech, id. at 708, and it’s hard to say that the text messages rise to the level of “true threats” under Virginia v. Black, 538 U.S. 343, 359 (2003), the closest recognized exception, given their content and the absence of any history of violence between Osinger and V.B. With respect to the emails and Facebook page, they don’t fall within any currently recognized exception either; the Supreme Court has left unresolved whether the First Amendment protects unauthorized disclosure of intensely private facts about a purely private figure. See Time, Inc. v. Hill, 385 U.S. 374, 383 n.7 (1967); cf. Snyder v. Phelps, 131 S. Ct. 1207, 1217 (2011) (suggesting that highly offensive speech on matters of purely private concern might not be insulated from civil liability). All of this is simply a long way of saying that we have to assume Osinger engaged in at least some speech that could be constitutionally protected. None of that speech is entitled to constitutional protection here, however, because all of it falls within the exception for speech integral to criminal conduct. Osinger used the text messages, emails, and Facebook page “as an integral part of conduct in violation of a valid criminal statute,” Giboney, 336 U.S. at 498—namely, his ongoing campaign to harass V.B. through repeated unwanted contacts. Unable to harass her in person after she left Illinois, he used speech to continue the campaign. See John B. Major, Note, Cyberstalking, Twitter, and the Captive Audience: A First Amendment Analysis of 18 U.S.C. § 2261A(2), 86 S. Cal. L. Rev. 117, 126 (2012). Because the “sole immediate object” of Osinger’s speech was to facilitate his commission of the interstate UNITED STATES V. OSINGER 31 stalking offense, that speech isn’t entitled to constitutional protection. Giboney, 336 U.S. at 498. What makes this a straightforward case is the fact that Osinger committed the offense by engaging in both speech and unprotected non-speech conduct. For the speechintegral-to-criminal-conduct exception to apply, the conduct need not have been criminal on its own; it’s enough if the conduct and speech together “constituted a single and integrated course of conduct, which was in violation of [a] valid law.” Id. Here, the non-speech conduct consisted of inperson harassment, which, together with the text messages, emails, and Facebook page, violated § 2261A(2). In other cases the non-speech conduct might consist of categorically unprotected speech, like the extortionate threats in United States v. Petrovic, 701 F.3d 847, 855 (8th Cir. 2012), or noncommunicative aspects of speech, like repeated unwanted telephone calls that are harassing due to their sheer number and frequency. See Gormley v. Dir., Conn. State Dep’t of Probation, 632 F.2d 938, 941–42 (2d Cir. 1980). Cases in which the defendant’s harassing “course of conduct” consists entirely of speech that would otherwise be entitled to First Amendment protection are less straightforward. The Court in Giboney made clear that the union’s picketing lost its First Amendment protection only because the union was “doing more than exercising a right of free speech or press.” 336 U.S. at 503. If a defendant is doing nothing but exercising a right of free speech, without engaging in any non-speech conduct, the exception for speech integral to criminal conduct shouldn’t apply. Instead, when pure speech is involved, the Court has suggested that the government’s ability “to shut off discourse solely to protect others from hearing it” depends on “a showing that 32 UNITED STATES V. OSINGER substantial privacy interests are being invaded in an essentially intolerable manner.” Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15, 21 (1971). It’s unclear whether this standard would apply in a § 2261A prosecution in which the defendant caused someone substantial emotional distress by engaging only in otherwise protected speech. That is a question whose resolution we wisely leave for another day.