Court Opinion

ID: 9462690
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 22:47:35.441429+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:37:43.464565
License: Public Domain

MULLIGAN, Circuit Judge
(concurring):
I agree that the conviction of the appellant Kelner must be affirmed. The language of the threat and the circumstances in which it was made as set forth in Judge Oakes’s opinion are in my view clearly within the statute [18 U.S.C. § 875(c)] and do not constitute protected speech within the First Amendment. The threat here cannot be sensibly characterized as an “exposition of ideas,” Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568, 572, 62 S.Ct. 766, 769, 86 L.Ed. *10291031, 1035 (1942) or the “communication of information or opinion,” Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296, 310, 60 S.Ct. 900, 906, 84 L.Ed. 1213, 1221 (1940).
The reason for this separate opinion is that I cannot accept Judge Oakes’s obiter dicta, “So long as the threat on its face and in the circumstances in which it is made is so unequivocal, unconditional, immediate and specific as to the person threatened, as to convey a gravity of purpose and imminent prospect of execution, the statute [18 U.S.C. § 875(c)] may properly be applied.” There is no doubt that the threat here is well within the rule announced. However, I see no reason to set forth a test for future cases which may well involve threats within the statute and not protected by the First Amendment, but which would not fall within the proposed rubric.
For example, if the threat here had been made in the same setting but had been phrased, “We plan to kill Arafat a week from today unless he pays us $1,000,000,” I would hold that the threat is still well within § 875(c) and not protected under the First Amendment although the threatened homicide is not immediate, imminent or unconditional under the test proposed by Judge Oakes. We have already held that a threat to assassinate the President some two weeks later is within a comparable statute, 18 U.S.C. § 871. United States v. Compton, 428 F.2d 18 (2d Cir. 1970), cert. denied, 401 U.S. 1014, 91 S.Ct. 1259, 28 L.Ed.2d 551 (1971). Although the opinion does not advert to the issue of immediacy, I would not think that that argument would change the result.
It is true that in Watts v. United States, 394 U.S. 705, 89 S.Ct. 1399, 22 L.Ed.2d 664 (1969)1 the Court, in reversing a conviction under § 871, characterized a threat to assassinate President Johnson as conditional. However, the setting was entirely different from that encountered here. The defendant there was an eighteen-year-old who was participating in a public rally of the W.E.B. DuBois Club on the Washington Monument grounds. He joined a gathering scheduled to discuss police brutality. After a suggestion by one member of the group that young people get more education before expressing their views, the defendant stated:
They always holler at us to get an education. And now I have already received my draft classification as 1-A and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J. They are not going to make me kill my black brothers.
394 U.S. at 706, 89 S.Ct. at 1400, 22 L.Ed.2d at 666. I do not think that Watte stands for the proposition that a conditional threat is necessarily protected by the First Amendment. • The circumstances of the threat made in that case indicate that the assassination was impossible since the defendant never intended to serve in the Armed Forces; that it was considered as a joke by the audience and that it was made in a setting of political and social discussion which should be encouraged and not condemned.
In sum, I believe that in view of the myriad circumstances which will attend the making of such threats and the rich vocabulary of invective available to those prone to indulge in the exercise condemned by the statute, the better course here is to decide each case on its facts, at least until such time as the Supreme Court provides further elucidation. Moreover, the proposed requirement that the threat be of immediate, imminent and unconditional injury seems to me to be required neither by the statute nor the First Amendment.
MESKILL, Circuit Judge

. The judgment of the Court was rendered in a per curiam opinion, with a separate concurrence by Justice Douglas. Justice White dissented without opinion, and Justices Stewart, Fortas and Harlan would have denied certiorari.