And the wingnuts can rejoice…

Urging Obama’s Assassination Is Lawful Online Speech, Divided Appeals Court Says

A Southern California man was wrongly convicted of online threats against Barack Obama two weeks before Obama was elected president in November 2008, a divided federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

“Re: Obama fk the niggar, he will have a 50 cal in the head soon,” read one of the messages posted on the Yahoo finance site by Walter Bagdasarian.

About 20 minutes later, Bagdasarian posted another statement after 1 a.m. on Oct. 22. “Shoot the nig country fkd for another 4 years+, what nig has done ANYTHING right???? long term???? never in history, except sambos.”

After Secret Service agents traced the remarks to him when a message board member tipped them off, Bagdasarian was found guilty of two counts of criminal threats to a presidential candidate. The La Mesa man was sentenced to two months in a halfway house. He appealed.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco concluded that Bagdasarian’s statements were “particularly repugnant” because they directly encourage violence. “We nevertheless hold that neither of them constitutes an offense within the meaning of the threat statute under which Bagdasarian was convicted” (.pdf), the appeals court wrote.