Virginia Supreme Court Overturns Anti-Spam Law
The conviction of a man once considered one of the world’s most prolific spammers was reversed on Friday as the Virginia Supreme Court declared the state’s anti-spam law unconstitutional.
Jeremy Jaynes’ argument was that the law violates the free-speech protections of the First Amendment because it does not just restrict commercial e-mails and the court unanimously agreed. Most other states also have anti-spam laws, and there is a federal CAN-SPAM Act as well.
Justice G. Steven Agee wrote:Â The Virginia law "is unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails, including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution."
Jaynes became the first person in the country to be convicted of a felony in 2004 for sending unsolicited bulk e-mail.
Authorities claimed Jaynes sent up to 10 million e-mails a day from his home in Raleigh, N.C. He was sentenced to nine years in prison.
He was charged in Virginia because the e-mails went through an AOL server there.
Last February, the state Supreme Court affirmed Jaynes’ conviction on several grounds but later agreed, without explanation, to reconsider the First Amendment issue. Jaynes was allowed to argue that the law unconstitutionally infringed on political and religious speech even though all his spam was commercial.
Thomas Wolf, Jaynes’ attorney, has said sending commercial spam would still be illegal under the federal CAN-SPAM Act even if Virginia’s law were invalidated.
However, he said the federal law would not apply to Jaynes because it was adopted after he sent the e-mails that were the basis for the state charges.