TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Boston Police Make Arrest in Devices Ploy

Re: Boston Police Make Arrest in Devices Ploy

Garrett Wollman (wollman@csail.mit.edu)
Thu, 1 Feb 2007 07:08:41 UTC

In article <telecom26.32.1@telecom-digest.org>,
Ken Maguire, AP <ap@telecom-digest.org> wrote:

> Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said he'll seek to punish those
> responsible, and indicated that the penalty could be two to five years
> in prison per count.

What Mumbles didn't mention was that, in order to convict someone
under the state's "hoax device" law, prosecutors must prove "intent to
cause anxiety, unrest, fear or personal discomfort to any person or
group of persons" (M.G.L. chap. 266, sec. 102a1/2(a)), which seems to
this untrained eye rather unlikely.

-- 
Garrett A. Wollman   | The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are
wollman@csail.mit.edu| nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry
Opinions not those   | grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape
of MIT or CSAIL.     | our history. - S.J. Gould, Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness


[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: See another message elsewhere in this
issue of the Digest. The 'terrorists' have been released from jail; I
doubt personally it will go any further.  PAT]

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