An Arizona man is asking a U.S. court to dismiss a charge of making threatening online comments toward law enforcement days after participating in an online exchange with people who had carried out a deadly attack in Australia
A lawyer for Donald Day Jr. of Heber, Arizona, said in a filing Tuesday that the two counts of interstate threats against his client should be thrown out because the indictment doesn’t allege that Day made statements of intent to harm any specific person.
Mark Rumold, who represents Day, also said Day’s online comments were not serious expressions of an intent to carry out violence and instead were protected speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
In one count, Day is accused of making threats four days after the killings in Australia to injure any law enforcement official who would come to Day’s home in eastern Arizona, about 145 miles (233 kilometers) miles from Phoenix. Rumold wrote that it was impossible to determine whether Day was threatening any particular person when he wrote that “the devils (who) come for us” will die.
On the other count, Day is accused of making online threats in 2023 to injure a person whose full identity isn’t provided in the indictment, though Day’s attorney said that person was Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization. Rumold disputed that Day’s comments about the WHO official can be classified as “true threats” as a matter of law.