U.S. Top Court Throws Out Pennsylvania Man's Conviction for Facebook Threats

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday threw out the conviction of a Pennsylvania man found guilty of making threatening statements on Facebook to his estranged wife as well as law enforcement officers and others. The court ruled 8-1 in favor of Anthony Elonis, who served prison time for posting a series of statements on the social media site in 2010 after his wife left him. After a court granted his wife a protective order against him, Elonis posted: "Is it thick enough to stop a bullet?" The case touched upon the rise of social media and how people use it to express strongly held feelings. The justices ruled that in order to prosecute Elonis, it was not sufficient that a reasonable person would have interpreted the remarks as threatening but rather that Elonis had to have intended the words as threats.