Free Speech vs. Hate Speech: This Judgment Goes Way Too Far

In England a young man, Liam Stacey, has been sentenced to 56 days in prison for racist tweets. See here. This is going way too far. It is pretty clear that the content of the tweets, concerning the fate of the black soccer player Fabrice Muamba who collapsed on the field from cardiac arrest during a recent game, is one in which the perpetrator was in a tiny minority; most people in England wished him well. What is the point, then, of arresting someone when social pressure can be just as effective?

On the other hand, suppose that there are many people who think as he does? Do supporters of this judgment think all of them should be jailed for their speech? These are the same people who think that America’s jailing so many blacks convicted of crimes is a bad thing, so it can’t be considered a good thing in other cases.

Then there is the comment of the judge: “Your comments aggravated this situation.” How? If, as is likely, Muamba didn’t know about these tweets, how was his medical situation aggravated? And if he somehow did know about them, then it must have been because someone told him about them, because I’m assuming he wasn’t capable of doing much social networking at that point. So, the blame would be on the person telling him and not Mr. Stacey. And if what is meant is the situation in which everyone else was hoping for his recovery, then what the judge said was factually false. Here it is:

At that moment, not just the footballer's family, not just the footballing world but the whole world were literally praying for his life.

There are lots of people in the world, especially here in the U.S., who have never heard of this young man and his plight. Others who had heard were not praying. I read many comments in various Internet venues in which people pointed out that praying wasn’t any good because there is no God. Presumably, they were sympathetic but were not praying.

Then there were the commenters who I suspect were progressive, though not all may have been, who resented all the attention this young man was getting, when there were others like him who weren’t getting any sympathy for the simple reason that they weren’t famous soccer players.

If Mr. Stacey should be jailed because his comments aggravated the situation, then why shouldn’t all of those other people be jailed as well? Didn’t their comments aggravate the situation?