Court Rules Death Threats Against Corporations Are Legal

In a 2-1 decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a
conviction against Kurt William Havelock, the 40-year-old Arizona man
who plotted a massacre outside of the 2008 Super Bowl in his home state
because his death threats were not mailed to any specific targets. "It
will be swift and bloody," Havelock wrote in letters sent to media
outlets half an hour before he abandoned his plan. (He still made it all
the way to the site of the Super Bowl with his new assault rifle and
dozens of rounds of ammunition.) "I will sacrifice your children upon
the altar of your excess." Havelock was arrested after turning himself
over the local police and was convicted on six counts of mailing
threatening letters, for which he was sentenced to a year in prison. In
making the decision Tuesday that overturned those convictions, Judge
William Canby wrote that the threatening-letters statute requires that
any death threats be addressed to an individual and not an institution
or corporation.

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Apparently the judges concluded corporations do a good enough job, along
with their investment bankers, of killing themselves.