Hoax Conviction Affirmed
Christopher Perez made two posts on his Facebook account, claiming he had paid a friend’s COVID-positive cousin to lick everything in two San Antonio grocery stores. The posts were false and there was no indication that they caused public panic, but the Government decided to prosecute him for perpetrating a hoax biological-weapons attack. He was convicted and sentenced to serve fifteen months’ imprisonment. He appealed his conviction.
The Fifth Circuit affirmed. First, it held that the crime was more than local and thus subject to federal jurisdiction. It reasoned, “If the act had actually been carried out, it could easily have created an outbreak of COVID-19 that could have been hard to contain. The resulting panic could have been severe. Thus, Perez used an instrumentality of interstate commerce, he claimed to have used a deadly virus and spread it widely, and his act would have had the potential to cause mass suffering.”
Second, it held the conviction did not violate the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. Perez’s posts were not free speech because it constituted a “true threat”—a statement where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals. True threats, even though Perez’s posts were false, “are unprotected because they have relatively low value and because restricting them ‘protects individuals from the fear of violence, from the disruption that fear engenders, and from the possibility that the threatened violence will occur.’”