Reason Magazine obtained a ruling vacating a federal district court gag order barring it from discussing a subpoena it received for records of six individuals who made intemperate comments on Reason’s website about the federal judge who presided over the trial of the founder of the drug website Silk Road. (Reason, June 19, 2015, by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch)
One of the comments suggested “feeding her [the judge] through a chipper.” “Considering that federal judges and their spouses have been attacked and even assassinated within recent memory, and that, so far as I know, some federal judges and their staff are genuinely concerned about their security as a result of public reactions not to speak of the craziness of some extremist segments of the population, it is hard to fault federal prosecutors from taking such comments seriously even if the comments themselves did not amount to ‘true threats’ that could properly be punished under the First Amendment,” wrote Paul Alan Levy for Public Citizen, June 20, 2015.