Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati upheld the conviction of a divorced Tennessee dad with the unlikely name of Franklin Delano Jeffries II who, in the midst of a custody battle, decided to post a YouTube video of himself singing a song with the sweet title “Daughter’s Love.”
The problem was that only a small portion of the song was actually about daughters and love; the rest was about Mr. Jeffries’ apparent desire to kill the judge overseeing the custody hearings, and possibly others.
As the appeals court judge put it:
The song contains sweet passages about relationships between fathers and daughters and the importance of spending time together. The rest boils into an assortment of the banal (complaints about his ex-wife), the ranting (gripes about lawyers and the legal system) and the menacing (threats to kill the judge if he doesn’t “do the right thing” at an upcoming custody hearing). Jeffries set the words to music and created a video of himself performing the song on a guitar painted with an American flag on it. The style is part country, part rap, sometimes on key, and surely therapeutic.
Here are the song’s opening verses:
I’ve had enough of this abuse from you.
It has been goin’ on for 13 years.
I have been to war and killed a man.
I don’t care if I go to jail for 2,000 years.
’Cause this is my daughter we’re talkin’ about,
And when I come to court this better be the last time.
I’m not kidding at all, I’m making this video public
’Cause if I have to kill a judge or a lawyer or a woman I don’t care.
One of Jeffries’ lawyers told the Wall Street Journal that this was all a misunderstood attempt at humor and that his client “never dreamed this message would get back to the judge,” a fact seemingly belied by that whole “I’m not kidding at all” line and the bit that followed about making the video public.
He followed this threat with a brief tribute to his daughter:
I love you; daughters are the beautiful things in my life.
It keeps me going and keeps me alive everyday.
And then it was back to threats (I’ve put the direct threats in bold):
I’m not kidding, judge, you better listen to me.
I killed a man downrange in war.
I have nothing against you, but I’m tellin’ you this better be the last court date. …
So I promise you, judge, I will kill a man.
This time better be the last time I end up in court …
And this s___ needs to stop because you’re gonna lose your job.
And I guarantee you, if you don’t stop, I’ll kill you.
’Cause I am gonna make a point either way you look at it somebody’s gotta pay,
And I’m telling you right now live on the Internet.
So put me in jail and make a big scene. …
So I’m gonna f___ somebody up, and I’m going back to war in my head.
So July the 14th is the last time I’m goin’ to court.
Believe that. Believe that, or I’ll come after you after court. Believe that.
I love my daughter.
Nobody’s going take her away from me.
’Cause I got four years left to make her into an adult.
I got four years left until she’s eighteen.
So stop this s___ because I’m getting tired of you,
And I don’t care if everybody sees this Internet site
Because it is the truth and it’s war. …
If fathers don’t have rights or women don’t have their rights or equal visitation,
Get their ass out of office.
’Cause you don’t deserve to be a judge and you don’t deserve to live.
You don’t deserve to live in my book.
And you’re gonna get some crazy guy like me after your ass.
And I hope I encourage other dads to go out there and put bombs in their goddamn cars.
Blow ’em up …
BOOM!
There went your f___in’ car. I can shoot you. I can kill you. I can
f___ you. Be my friend. Do something right. Serve my daughter.
Well, prosecutors took him up on that offer to “put [him] in jail,” and a jury agreed; Jeffries was sentenced to 18 months for his threats. And now the conviction has been upheld in Circuit Court.
You can read rest of the lyrics and the judge’s opinion here. (It’s in pdf form.)
So… he was planning to have custody of his daughter in jail?
Incidentally I am totally stealing “F*ck you, be my friend” for my next opera.
it was his family court judge he threatened. he had unsupervised visits, but the judge scheduled a followup hearing and that’s when he decided the best course of action was death threats
Viscaria: Family jail!
The judge’s opinion is hilarious.
@Sharculese:
Yeah… but what I have gathered from this (and I might be confused) is that he doesn’t want to risk losing any of those visits, so his solution would be… murder, which is the quickest way to ensure he’ll only ever see her through a pane of glass.
There was a sale on ellipses at the punctuation store today…
…
…
…
Oh, wow.
Yep, he totally didn’t mean for this to be taken as a serious threat! He just sent it to his State Representative and the news!!
No, see, Viscaria, you’re making a classic mistake.
You see, if you use JUST THE RIGHT WORDS when you bully somebody mercilessly, they’ll simply do exactly what you want them to do, and you won’t have to kill them!!!! That’s how the world works, right?
Yes, because life is like an action movie, where if you kill enough bad guys you get everything you want. Like, if you kill enough cops, the other ones will go “uh oh, this guy is too much of a badass for us, we better stop going after him.”
Or if you kill a judge, the system will just shrug and go “Well, now there’s no judge for this case! So we better just drop it and forget it ever happened!”
Threats don’t count if they sort-of rhyme.
This sounds naive, but having read lots of posts defended on the grounds of free speech, is threatening someone actually a crime in the US? Is it only a crime if the person is important or are death threats etc generally illegal? What are the limits in terms of what counts as a threat and what is free speech? I guess this shouldn’t be so surprising but I didn’t really know. It isn’t that I plan to threaten people I’m just confused.
“Daughters Love”?? Ugh. I can’t think of a more disgusting title for a song that is so demonstrably not about daughters or love of any kind. I really feel for his daughter. That’s got to be some kind of fucked up mind job to have your dad write and sing and post on the internet that horrible shit and call it “Daughters Love”. Jesus Jones.
I understand your confusion, Pear_tree. If you read the decision David linked to, it may clear some stuff up… or make it worse.
Or, check out the law.
871. Threats against President and successors to the
Presidency.
872. Extortion by officers or employees of the United
States.
873. Blackmail.
874. Kickbacks from public works employees.
875. Interstate communications.
876. Mailing threatening communications.
877. Mailing threatening communications from foreign
country.
878. Threats and extortion against foreign officials,
official guests, or internationally protected
persons.
879. Threats against former Presidents and certain other
persons.
Just speaking a threat against a private citizen out loud is not really covered.
Interstate communications–the internet–kinda sneak in there.
(if it’s extortion or blackmail, that’s different)
(if you’re a candidate for President from a major party, that’s different)
Clear as mud?
True threats (as opposed to political hyperbole) are always illegal, though it’s a more serious crime when you target public officials. The Whitest Kids You Know explain here:
Also, what he said at the end sounds like incitement to commit a crime, which is also illegal.
@pear_tree
there’s a certain point of abstraction where it starts to merge into things that might be protected speech, but a direct threat against another person definitely isn’t protected speech. Judge Sutton has a good summary of the law on that point:
i took out the internal citations to make it more readable
Nicholas, that’s such a good quote I just added it to the post.
Well fuck. This dude’s a whole new level of scary.
@Pear_tree: It is generally illegal to threaten someone in the United States.
Our First Amendment was put in place in light of the British Empire smashing printing presses and locking people up for writing pamphlets about how no one ought to have to pay George III any taxes if he wasn’t going to listen to us ask about things we needed done. The amendment primarily prevents the government and the people from quashing expression by denying it an avenue; it doesn’t say anything about avoiding the consequences of what you say or write.
So yeah, Mr. Jeffries is liable for threatening judges and lawyers.
As for the rest of your questions, ideally threats against the least of these should be given as much weight as threats against judges or the President, but in any event, threats against courts cannot be tolerated because the courts need to be free to render an impartial judgment.
And it’s not really fair to cry “ninja’d” when what happened was I fell asleep at the keyboard.
IANAL, but my bet is that the “interstate communications” is part of what makes it a federal case. States probably have similar laws about threats that don’t require the threat be communicated across state lines.
Why the hell is it that right-wingers never grasp scansion? Not one. It’s why they gravitate to country music, where the rhythms are very forgiving of extra and missing syllables and misplaced emphases. Seriously, point at one right-winger who can consistently do accurate scansion and no fair saying Rudyard Kipling. I mean, yes, Kipling, but c’mon.
@Noah Brand: I hear T S Eliot was rather patriarchal.
Ezra Pound?
@Noah Brand: One would think right-wingers would prefer verse that scanned perfectly. Scansion being all regimented and traditional and so on, and “free verse” sounding suspiciously like it’s related to “free love.”
I don’t get it either.