An Illinois man who faced three years in prison for threatening a public defender with the words “I’m gonna get you” is off the hook after an appellate court overturned his conviction.
Declaring that “I’m gonna get you” is a general statement that does not constitute a material threat, the Illinois Appellate Court for the 4th District reversed the conviction of Stanley A. Dye, who was found guilty at a bench trial of threatening harm to the female public defender representing him in a drug case.
After being handed a three-year sentence, Dye appealed the case and won. From the appellate court’s Aug. 3 decision:
We reverse the trial court’s judgment because when we look at the evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution, we conclude it would be impossible for any rational trier of fact to find, beyond a reasonable doubt, that defendant made a “true threat” …
His threat, “‘I’m gonna get you,’” was ambiguous as to whether the intended meaning was violent retribution or nonviolent retribution, and nothing about the context of the threat could reasonably resolve the ambiguity.
On February 7, 2013, defendant had an appointment with his attorney, Jacqueline Lacy, the Vermilion County public defender. The appointment was in her office, on the third floor of the courthouse. In their meeting, Lacy told him she had some bad news: because he had been less than forthright with her, she had subpoenaed some documents, and as a result, she had inadvertently uncovered evidence that was harmful to his case. The State would receive a copy of the subpoenaed documents. Evidently, the documents pertained to the chemical testing of a crack pipe.
Defendant became irate and demanded that Lacy have the crack pipe retested. She declined to do so. He raised his voice. She raised her voice. He threatened to complain about her to Judge DeArmond and request a different attorney. She said to go ahead, but she predicted that Judge DeArmond would decline to appoint him a different attorney. He accused her of selling him out and working for the State. She told him he “needed to” leave her office. He did so.
As he was exiting through the waiting room, defendant told Lacy, two or three times, “‘I’m gonna get you.’“ He pointed at her or at the floor as he said those words. Lacy asked him, “‘Are you fucking threatening me?’“ According to defendant’s testimony, he replied, “‘No, no. I ain’t threatening you.’“
A paralegal who worked in the public defender’s office, Andrew Bower, had stepped between defendant and Lacy because of “the way [defendant] was standing, his mannerisms, how aggressive he was with his speech, his posture.” Bower put his hand on defendant’s shoulder, to guide him out the door and into the hall. Defendant ignored him and left….
Lacy, who was scared, trembling, and on the verge of tears, called the police….
The appeals court went on to parse the Oxford English Dictionary’s nuanced definitions of the word “get,” concluding that it is “just as apt a word for nonviolent punishment as violent punishment, and some additional facts, beyond the mere utterance, would be necessary to infer, beyond a reasonable doubt, that ‘I’m going to get you’ was intended as a threat of violence.”
In other words, Stanley could just as easily have been planning to trash talk the attorney to all his friends as to do her physical harm.
The post Saying ‘I’m gonna git you sucka!’ is not a crime appeared first on Personal Liberty®.
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2015/08/06/saying-im-gonna-git-you-sucka-is-not-a-crime/
from WordPress https://toddmsiebert.wordpress.com/2015/08/06/saying-im-gonna-git-you-sucka-is-not-a-crime/
No comments:
Post a Comment