Top NY Court Champions Freedom to Annoy (and be a Troll)
The criminal defense lawyer William Kunstler used to say, “This is New York and there’s no law against being annoying.”
On Tuesday, the state’s highest court appeared to agree, striking down a statute that made it a felony to communicate with someone “in a manner likely to cause annoyance or alarm.”
The ruling, rendered by the Court of Appeals in Albany in a near-unanimous decision, is expected to have a broad effect on hundreds of harassment cases currently being prosecuted in the city. Ronald L. Kuby, one of the lawyers involved in the original case, called the decision a victory for “the demented and dissident, the crazies and the critical, the malcontents and the maladjusted — amen.”
The case involved Raphael Golb, a 54-year-old Greenwich Village resident who waged a yearslong campaign against the academic rivals of his father, Norman Golb, a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar. Using dozens of pseudonyms, the younger Mr. Golb accused the rivals of ignoring or plagiarizing his father’s work to further their own careers. For added effect, he opened email accounts in the names of some of his antagonists, and wrote messages appearing to confess to wronging Norman Golb.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/14/nyregion/top-court-champions-freedom-to-annoy.html?_r=1
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