Last week, I was honored to defend Colorado’s stalking law before the U.S. Supreme Court in Counterman v. Colorado. In this case, our work standing up for victims and advancing public safety will not only affect Colorado but also our nation.
The issue in the case (you can listen to the oral argument here) is whether the First Amendment provides stalkers who threaten victims with a defense that they meant nothing by their objectively terrifying statements.
In the Counterman case, the victim was terrorized for over two years by the perpetrator who sent her over a thousand messages via Facebook messenger that escalated in aggressiveness (including statements like “Die. Don’t Need You.”). This threatening stalking continued in the face of multiple efforts to block him. The victim, whose emerging singing career was undermined and her life upended by this terrifying behavior, told her story in this powerful article.
Our department’s work to address stalking is closely connected to our work addressing domestic violence. As I argued to the Supreme Court, 90 percent of actual and attempted domestic violence homicides begin with stalking.To protect victims, we also filed a brief last week with the Supreme Court in a different case, asking it to uphold a federal law that makes it a crime for perpetrators of domestic violence to possess firearms and was struck down by a federal court of appeals.
