213487P.pdf   09/02/2022  United States  v.  Dennis Sryniawski
   U.S. Court of Appeals Case No:  21-3487
   U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska - Omaha   
   [PUBLISHED] [Colloton, Author, with Smith, Chief Judge, and Shepherd, 
   Circuit Judge] 
   Criminal case - Criminal law. When the federal cyberstalking statute - 18 
   U.S.C. Sec. 2261A(2)(B) - is interpreted in a way consonant with the First 
   Amendment, the evidence was not sufficient to support defendant's 
   conviction for cyberstalking; the First Amendment's Free Speech Clause 
   prohibits Congress from punishing political speech intended to harass or 
   intimidate in the broad sense of those words; for this reason, the statute 
   cannot be applied constitutionally to a defendant who, like this 
   defendant, directs speech on a matter of public concern to a political 
   candidate with intent merely to trouble or annoy the candidate; the 
   government does not maintain that the emails defendant sent contained a 
   true threat to the candidate or his family, and its arguments that three 
   categories of harassing speech are unprotected - speech integral to 
   criminal conduct, defamatory speech and obscenity - are not sufficient to 
   support the conviction given this record.