I’ve been thinking a lot about threats and juries lately.

Going over the page proofs for my novel Verdict Déjà vu yesterday, I came across this passage on the topic of threats and juries, which I’d forgotten I’d written :

• “Iris [my juror character] wondered [ . . . ] if she should report the anonymous call to the judge, but finally decided against it, because he might use it as an excuse to dismiss her. Nor did she wish to be accused of being a typical, helpless, frightened female, especially when she could not even prove she had really been threatened.”

A female juror character in the BBC series “The Jury” (2002) has almost exactly the same experience and same reaction.

I suspect most people don’t know it’s a crime to make a threat. (I also suspect most people don’t know that jurors’ identities are in the public records—at least in this country. If “The Jury” is to be believed, in Britain jurors’ identities are kept secret. I’ve written before that I think this would be a good policy.)

During the Brandon Craig trial I temporarily closed comments on this blog, because some comments on blog posts about the trial contained threats. It isn’t pleasant—to say the least—to have this happen, but my online experience is that people say stupid, cruel things online all the time, so I didn’t really take it seriously. That was a mistake. Threats are crimes.

When novelist June Shaw recently wrote a guest blog, she mentioned that she served on a jury in an armed robbery case in which there was no gun, only the threat of a gun. I did a little research and discovered that in many jurisdictions armed robbery is defined as robbery with a gun or with the threat of a gun. At the time that struck me as strange—as so many legalities do—but now on reflection I realize the wisdom of this.

Threats are a form of terrorism (and terrorism is injurious to us all, regardless of the Feds’ desire to eradicate the term from our vocabulary). Threats are often the precursor to physical acts of violence.

We’re all taught as children that, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” I wonder why. That jingle isn’t true. Words do hurt, and we all know it. In fact, it was apparently the words of one of my Craig-trial posts that impacted some people enough to cause them to respond with threats (and I’m not referring to the friend of one of the murder victims who chastised me for being callous to the suffering of the victims’ families—I think he misread what I had written, but he was certainly entitled to express his opinion).

Schools seem to be a hotbed of threats these days. Grade-school, middle-school, and high-school children threaten their classmates and teachers. Some follow through with violent, bloody attacks. Growing up doesn’t seem to help the situation, either. College students make threats; college students go on shooting rampages.

College students use the Internet to threaten classmates, teachers, and even public officials. I doubt there’s a college in the country that hasn’t been contacted by the FBI about threats emanating from their servers or a college teacher in this country who hasn’t been threatened by at least one student. I thought colleges used to be “the ivory tower”—”the alma mater.” But that must have been a very long time ago. I’ve been involved in academe for more decades than I like to admit. And the whole time I felt threatened.

Someone needs to educate young people about threats. The problem is out of hand.

If anyone under thirty is reading this blog post, please pay attention to what I have to say:

Freedom of speech is a precious gift from our Founding Fathers. Freedom of speech is granted to Americans by the First Amendment to the Constitution. It is not one of the “god-given human rights” that everyone seems to cite as justification for their bad behavior. American law gives us the right to speak our minds about politics, religion, ethics, and facts and to use words, music, and art to express ourselves as well.

The law expressly prohibits some forms of speech, though: libel, slander, “hate speech,” incitement, and speech that shows gross disregard for human life, such as crying “Fire” in a crowded place or urging someone to commit suicide—and the law prohibits threats of many kinds, not only threats of violence. Advertisers can’t make fraudulent claims about their products and services. Creditors are prohibited from making threats or even from nuisance dunning to collect debts. Blackmail is a form of threat, even when the threat is only to expose secrets or otherwise embarrass someone, hold him up to ridicule, or “turn him in” for some crime.

You can’t say everything you want to and claim you’re exercising your “freedom of speech.” You can’t say truly hurtful things, even when the person to whom or about whom you say them may well deserve to be hurt. You can’t make false or idle threats, because there’s no such thing. You can’t threaten people, even if they’re criminals. If you do, it makes you a criminal, too.

And you can’t say everything you want to on the Internet and in email just because you think you’re anonymous online. First of all, there is no such thing as anonymity or privacy online—and it’s about time young people figured this out, because acting as if the truth is otherwise is stupid.

Even if you were anonymous, you still could not legally threaten anyone. For speech to be a threat, there’s no requirement that the speaker’s name must be known. Terrorists rarely put return addresses on their threats. Blackmailers don’t put return addresses on their threats. Ransom notes bear no return addresses.

Threats are threats, no matter who makes them.

If you think about the Brandon Craig murder trial, you realize that the brutal massacre of three high-school students in 1999 apparently started with threats—it was all about threats, according to prosecution witnesses.

Caveat: I am not a lawyer. I know nothing about this case but what I’ve heard on TV and read online. Mr. Craig was found not proven guilty. What I’m about to say is pure speculation of my part (as a fiction writer) and is based only on what little trial testimony I heard.

From what I’ve heard of the testimony, the problem allegedly started when a teenage girl allegedly distributed drugs to Craig. On the witness stand she said she gave Craig $500’s worth of cocaine to sell “on credit” (my words). If so, she was incredibly stupid. The last person I would give credit to would be a drug dealer. But that’s what I heard her say she had done.

Then, according to this same witness, one night she nagged Craig to pay her back. Craig, allegedly, claimed he couldn’t pay her back because he had not been paid for the dope he sold.

I’m uncertain about who this “deadbeat” buyer was. Perhaps Craig is alleged to have named one of the victims. Perhaps the teenage girl was too stoned to know who Craig claimed owed him the money. But, if I heard her testimony correctly (and I may not have), she was essentially threatening Craig in some way to get him to cough up the money she thought he owed her.

Then she and Craig and two others got stoned, allegedly, got in a car (Craig in the driver’s seat), allegedly, and went out “gunning” for the deadbeat, allegedly. I suppose the idea wasn’t to go kill someone—that wouldn’t have made any sense if they really wanted their money. The idea must have been to threaten people with the gun so they would pay up. Right? Or am I missing a lot here?

Threats. Kids thinking threats are cool. Kids making threats to make themselves feel important and powerful.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve heard alleged by the prosecution in the trial. Threats, followed by violence.

• Even as I write this, I wonder about issues of freedom of speech related to discussing a past trial in which the defendant was found not guilty. I agree with the jury that the prosecution did not prove guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt,” although I also believed the substance of the accusers’ testimony, if not every detail. Clearly, someone “out there” murdered three innocent teenagers. The prosecution witnesses’ testimony alleged that threats and drugs were at the root of the crime.