A White House petition calling on the Obama administration to arrest Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has gotten more than 79,000 signatures, but it’s probably going nowhere.
The petition — created March 13, by someone known only as “P.M.” from Los Angeles — calls on the Obama administration to arrest Trump for inciting violence among his supporters. Several Trump rallies have turned violent, with protesters and members of the media getting beaten up or forcefully accosted. Trump himself has embraced these aspects of his campaign.
As precedent, the petition cites Bradenburg v. Ohio, a 1969 landmark Supreme Court case that reversed the conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader who’d been arrested and convicted for speaking at a rally. Police said the Klan leader’s remarks violated a law against advocating “crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform.”
The Supreme Court, however, saw things differently. It threw out the man’s conviction and struck down the law on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment. The high court also created a test to allow the government to prosecute this kind of speech when it is designed to incite or produce “imminent lawless action.”
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>petition Nobody cares what 100,000,000 armchair activists think