Supreme Court Won’t Reinstate VA Spam Law

The U.S. Supreme Court said yesterday it will not consider reviving Virginia’s anti-spam law. And as a result, spammer Jeremy Jaynes remains a free man.

Virginia’s attorney general in December appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate the state’s anti-spam law after Virginia’s Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional, reversing Jaynes’ conviction and nine-year prison sentence.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision not to revive Virginia’s anti-spam law means Jaynes’ conviction reversal is permanent.

In November of 2004, Jaynes was convicted by a jury in Loudoun County Circuit Court on three counts of violating Virginia’s Anti-Spam Act, which was passed in 2003.

The case was the nation’s first felony conviction for spamming. After Jaynes was sentenced in 2005 to nine years in jail, he appealed, claiming Virginia’s spam law was unconstitutional.
In September of 2006 the Virginia Court of Appeals upheld the conviction.

The Virginia Supreme Court in March 2008 also upheld the decision, but later agreed to reconsider the first-amendment question.

Last September, Virginia’s court unanimously agreed with Jaynes’ argument that the law violated the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution because it restricted non-commercial e-mail as well as commercial messages.

In rendering the court’s opinion, Justice G. Steven Agee wrote Virginia’s anti-spam law was “unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails, including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.”

Plans are reportedly in the works to amend the law to exclude non-commercial e-mail.

Virginia’s Anti-Spam Act prohibited the sending of unsolicited bulk e-mail by fraudulent means, such as changing the header or routing information to prevent recipients from contacting or determining the identity of the sender.

According to prosecutors, Jaynes in 2003 sent tens of thousands of unsolicited e-mails with false headers and return-address information to AOL subscribers advertising dubious products such as a Fedex refund-claim product, a penny stock picker and an Internet history eraser.

Police searching Jaynes’ home found discs with more than 176 million e-mail addresses and 1.3 billion user names on them, some of them stolen by a former AOL employee, according to officials.