McDonnell works to block spam

Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell yesterday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate Virginia's anti-spam e-mail law.

In September the Virginia Supreme Court held that the Anti-Spam Act of 2003 was unconstitutional for barring all anonymous, unsolicited bulk e-mails -- even those with political, religious or other protected content, not just commercial speech which can be restricted.

The justices tossed out the 2004 Loudoun County convictions against one of the world's most notorious spammers, Jeremy D. Jaynes -- the first felony spam convictions in the country.

"Illegal spammers cannot be tolerated in Virginia," McDonnell said yesterday. "Through their actions, they defraud our citizens and impede electronic commerce. . . . I hope that the U.S. Supreme Court will grant our petition and uphold this landmark statute," he added.

Jaynes' lawyer, Thomas M. Wolf, said a unanimous Virginia Supreme Court held the law violates the First Amendment.

"Because this statute is so clearly overboard, and can easily be amended to apply only to commercial e-mail like the anti-spam statutes of nearly every other state, I doubt that the [U.S. Supreme] court would be interested in this case," said Wolf.

Wolf said, "If you were engaged in electronic overseas ministry and sent 10,000 anonymous e-mails about the Gospel to Muslims around the world, you could be sentenced to five years in prison . . . even if every recipient of the e-mail were happy to get it."

"What possible interest does the government have in criminalizing such conduct?" he asked.

A spokesman for the attorney general's office, however, said it is their assertion that the law is completely constitutional.

McDonnell's office said the Virginia justices erred in striking down the anti-spam law on the grounds that it could be unconstitutional in hypothetical circumstances involving political or religious speech that were not present in the Jaynes case.

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide by early next year whether to hear the case.

Jaynes is in a federal prison serving 42 months on an unrelated fraud conviction. At the time of his arrest on the spam charges, Jaynes was listed as the eighth-worst spammer in the world on The Spamhaus Project's Registry of Known Spammer Organizations.
Contact Frank Green at (804) 649-6340 or .