Attorneys for the veteran, Franklin Jeffries, maintained that the federal threats law — which dates to a 1932 statute making extortion illegal and applies to the offline world as well — was unconstitutional. A felony conviction, these lawyers said, is wrongly based on whether a “reasonable person” (.pdf) would believe the threatening statement was made with the intent to inflict bodily injury and was uttered to achieve some goal through intimidation.
Kenneth R. Pybus, Associate Professor
The website for the Communication Law course at Abilene Christian University