The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression has issued its 2009 list of winners of its Jefferson Muzzles, an ignominious award designed to “call[] attention to those who in the past year forgot or disregarded Mr. Jefferson’s admonition that freedom of speech ‘cannot be limited without being lost.’” Number three on the list is a Michigan judge who imprisoned a minister for writing a newspaper article that criticized his ruling.
 

For sentencing a minister to 3-10 years in jail largely because he deemed the minister’s prediction of what God would do to another judge as a “true threat,” a 2009 Jefferson Muzzle goes t0 Berrien County Judge Dennis Wiley.

Edward Pinkney, a Baptist minister and community activist in Benton Harbor, Michigan, is currently appealing a 2007 conviction for violating Michigan’s election law. The focus of this Muzzle is not that conviction, however, but a judicial finding in 2008 that Rev. Pinkney violated a term of his probation stemming from the earlier conviction.

In June 2008, Berrien County Judge Dennis Wiley sentenced Rev. Pinkney to 3-10 years in jail for violating a probation condition that prohibited him from engaging in “any assaultive, abusive, defamatory, demeaning, harassing, violent, threatening or intimidating behavior….” The revocation of Rev. Pinkney’s probation was based entirely on statements he made in a letter to the editor published in the People’s Tribune, a local newspaper that appears both in print and on-line. Judge Wiley found that the editorial letter’s highly critical comments of a fellow judge (the judge who presided over Pinkney’s earlier trial) violated the prohibition of engaging in defamatory, demeaning, and threatening behavior.

Although there are strong legal arguments to challenge Judge Wiley’s findings that Rev. Pinkney’s letter constituted “defamatory” or “demeaning” behavior, the basis of this Muzzle is his finding that it constituted “threatening” behavior.* This finding was based entirely on a single paragraph of the letter which paraphrased a selection from the Bible’s Book of Deuteronomy and included a prediction by Rev. Pinkney that, unless the judge changed his ways, “The Lord shall smite thee with consumption and with a fever and with an inflammation and with extreme burning.”