14 DAY TRIAL // The Supreme Court of the United States has declined an appeal from the Virginia Attorney General, asking for the state's anti-spam legislation, ruled unconstitutional by a local court, to be reinstated. This decision will set notorious spammer Jeremy Jaynes, previously convicted to 9 years for his cybercrimes, free.
Back in 2003, the state of Virginia enacted a tough anti-spam law making it a misdemeanor to send unsolicited e-mail messages by forging elements of the e-mail header or the sending IP address. Furthermore, this action became a felony if more than 10,000 such bulk e-mails were sent during a 24-hour period.
This legislation led to the first criminal conviction of a spammer, in the person of Jeremy D. Jaynes, in the United States. In 2004, Jaynes was convicted to nine years in prison for sending unsolicited commercial messages to hundreds of thousands of AOL customers, after obtaining an AOL database that contained around 100 million e-mail addresses.
Jaynes is not originally from Virginia, but because AOL's headquarters and servers are there, he was trialled at the Loudoun Circuit Court. The Virginia Supreme Court originally reinforced the ruling, but after an appeal, it surprisingly reverted it, deciding that the state's anti-spam law conflicted with the First Amendment and was, therefore, unconstitutional.
This was because, as opposed to the federal anti-spam legislation, the law in Virginia applied to all kinds of unsolicited e-mail messages and not just to commercial ones that had monetary gains as a purpose. Therefore, it was violating the right to free and anonymous speech.
Bob McDonnell, Virginia's Attorney General at the time, appealed the decision at the Supreme Court of the United States, hoping for the legislation to be reinstated. Since the High Court just rejected the appeal, Jeremy Jaynes will walk free, after he finishes serving a sentence of 42 months in prison for an unrelated offense.
The current Virginia Attorney General, Bill Mims, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that, "Obviously, I am disappointed by the decision, since the chance of the statute actually being applied in an unconstitutional manner is exceptionally slim. However, I respect the decision of the court."
The Virginia Office of the Attorney General is in the process of drafting new anti-spam legislation that will resolve the constitutional issues raised by the old one. Meanwhile, Joseph Rainsbury, one of Jeremy Jaynes' lawyers, commented for The Washington Post that this marked "a victory not only for Jeremy, but for the First Amendment."