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To: elfman2
Be cause it’s misleading. The WND knows that no one’s going to actually get 47 years.

Many free speech cases involve genuine risk of only nominal punishment. Some involve no risk of real punishment at all. In almost every such case it is the unlikely maximum risk of punishment (what "could" happen) that is stressed by the opponents of the law or state action. Why? Because no one really knows beforehand what a particular jury or judge will decide by way of punishment on any particular or in any particular case. It is small comfort to reassure a defendant who has just received five years in prison for chanting a bible verse whie standing on a sidewalk, "Wow, dude. I never expected you to get more than a suspended six month sentence and community service. But at least I was right about you not receiving 47 years hard time."

The maximum punishment is stressed because it is real, not because it is likely. The real but unlikely has a chilling effect on free expression that is every bit as effective as the real but likely.

These people are being targeted for the political and faith-based content of their message, for publicly expressing disagreement with a powerful special interest group. That is abhorrent.

52 posted on 01/14/2005 7:55:17 AM PST by JCEccles
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To: JCEccles
" It is small comfort to reassure a defendant who has just received five years in prison for chanting a bible verse whie standing on a sidewalk"

Claiming these people were arrested for chanting Bible verses is as much a fraud as claiming the girl disrupting our protest almost got arrested for being black.

57 posted on 01/14/2005 8:10:55 AM PST by elfman2 ("As goes Fallujah, so goes central Iraq and so goes the entire country" -Col Coleman, USMC ,4/2004)
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