Virginia Court Overturns Spammer’s Sentence

DailyTech.com is reporting that a Virginia Supreme Court just overturned Jeremy Jayne’s sentence, thus freeing him from prison, on charges of spamming thousands of AOL users in 2004. The judge deemed the anti-spam law unconstitutional. Jeremy’s case became known all across the world as this was the US’s first conviction against a spammer.

In 2004, Jeremy sent thousands upon thousands of emails, multiple times, to AOL users over a 24 hour period. According to DailyTech, “he initially wanted the charges dismissed on the grounds ‘that the statute violated the dormant Commerce Clause, was unconstitutionally vague, and violated the First Amendment.’ The circuit court denied Jaynes’ motion.” He was sentenced to prison for nine years and that is when he decided to take it to the Appeals Court.

According to the report, “the anti-spam rule was deemed unconstitutional because it violates the First Amendment’s free-speech protections due to it restricting commercial e-mail and all other unsolicited e-mails.  For example, political, religious and other protected speech are lumped into the commercial e-mail ban.”

The State of Virginia mentioned this morning they plan on appealing the ruling to the US Supreme Court.