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John Roberts’ Unfunny Stalking Jokes at SCOTUS

Slate Daily Feed

Slate

Business, News, Society & Culture

3.91.1K Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2023

⏱️ 60 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As laughter ricocheted around the Supreme Court chamber Wednesday, Professor Mary Anne Franks wondered if she could quite believe her ears. The matter of some hilarity, it seems, were messages sent by a convicted stalker to his victim. Individual messages that were among what one detective estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands - possibly as many as one million messages - sent by Billy Raymond Counterman to singer Coles Whalen. Counterman’s campaign of harassment drove Whalen away from performing, indeed drove her away from her home state. She moved across the country to get away. On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Professor Mary Anne Franks to discuss Counterman v Colorado and how the details of a cyber-stalking case were lost to free speech concerns about trigger warnings and "sensitivity". You can read Prof. Franks’ powerful piece on this here


In this week’s Amicus Plus segment, Dahlia is joined by Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern to discuss the big fat settlement Dominion got in its defamation case against Fox News, and why it feels so unsatisfying, the religious liberty case you probably missed at the court this week, Groff v DeJoy. They also talk about how Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s continued absence from the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Senate Democrats’ workarounds for it, are like bringing a bubble blower to a knife fight. 


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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Jane loved crisps. She ate them for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

0:05.5

Even at Fancy Pants restaurants, years went by, but then crisps stopped doing it for her.

0:12.7

They got her thrown out of cinemas and were forever in the bedsheets.

0:19.6

crisps. They're kind of like your current account, just because they were good ones doesn't mean

0:24.4

you have to stick with them forever. Maybe it's time to switch with the current account switch

0:29.3

service. It wasn't enough for the oral arguments to trivialize and express contempt for the

0:37.2

harm of stalking altogether. It says staying in cyber life is going to kill you. I can't promise I

0:42.8

haven't said that. Come out, come out, come out for coffee. You have my number.

0:49.6

They also go in to say and let us just be clear about how the real problem today and the real

0:54.7

issue today is not stalking its sensitivity. It's just how darn sensitive people are.

1:00.4

We live in a world in which people are sensitive for hypersensitive about different things now.

1:06.5

Nowadays people would be more sensitive to that and people could feel threatened in different ways.

1:11.5

We're going to hold people liable, willy-nilly for that.

1:14.9

Hi and welcome back to Amicus. This is Slate's podcast about the law and the courts and the

1:25.9

Supreme Court and I'm diet looks like and I cover some of those things for Slate.com and while

1:32.2

this legal beat might once have been, I think, compared to a leisurely ride on the moving sidewalk

1:39.6

through the Denver Airport, it's now pretty much become that scene from King Kong where everything

1:44.5

is just flying at your head and you're waving around your arms like in terror. In the course of

1:50.7

preparing this week's show, there have been a bunch of near misses. We plan to focus on the Dominion

1:57.2

court battle, but it settled immediately after jury selection. Then we talked about attempting

2:02.7

to anticipate the outcome of this rolling administrative stay in that fifth circuit,

2:08.4

Mifipristone case. We talked about discussing yet more revelations about justice, Clarence

...

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