Hello, fellow law nerds.

Welcome to another episode of Boom Lawyer, a rewired.combeau news podcast hosted by the legal

journalism team that is not going to be discussing the Mueller report today so you will have

some reprieve from the madness.

I'm Imani Gandhi. And I'm Jess Peeklo. Rewire.com news is dedicated to bringing you the best

reproductive rights and social justice news, commentary, and analysis on the web, and the

Team Legal podcast is part of that mission. So a big thank you to our subscribers and a welcome to our new

listeners. Today we're going to talk about the case of Jamal Knox. He's a young rapper who was

sent to jail because a couple of cops in Pennsylvania heard one of his songs and got all nervous

about it. He was charged and convicted for making terroristic threats and witness intimidation.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld his conviction by concluding that he had a specific

intent to threaten two police officers with his rap lyrics.

The Supreme Court refused to take up Jamal's case this week, even though it presented a

great question for

the court to answer, and that is, when are words true threats and when are they protected free speech?

And that's exactly what we're going to talk about in this episode. True threats, free speech,

and how, weirdly enough, those issues always seem to work out to benefit white Christian patriarchy.

Funny how that works.

Funny.

Okay, Amani, I'm excited to dive into this episode because it's a nice, meaty one, but where do we

begin?

There's a lot to talk about here.

...