Virginia Overturns Spam Law and Frees Spammer

The Virginia Supreme court has overturned the state’s anti-spam law, citing it as a violation of the First Amendment right to anonymous free speech. As a result, the conviction of Jeremy Jaynes, who was sentenced to 9 years in prison for sending hundreds of thousands of spam messages to AOL customers, was overturned.

           Everyone agreed Jaynes was incredibly guilty, but the issue was the peculiarity of the Virginia law in that it could be read to apply to people who were sending junk e-mail but not quite as naughtily as Jaynes was doing it,” said John Levine, president of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE). “In the United States, we have this ancient tradition where political and religious speech are very strongly protected, but the Virginia law applied equally to all speech, commercial or not.”

Jayne, the first spammer to be prosecuted under the law,  has had no comment on the matter, but the Virginia Attorney General intends to appeal the decision and take it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

 ”Today, the Supreme Court of Virginia has erroneously ruled that one has a right to deceptively enter somebody else’s private property for purposes of distributing his unsolicited fraudulent emails. I respectfully but fervently disagree,” McDonnell said in a written statement. “We will take this issue directly to the Supreme Court of the United States. The right of citizens to be free from unwanted fraudulent emails is one that I believe must be made secure.”

A copy of the court’s decision can be read here.