Comments on: Pennsylvania bill would enable victims to sue offender for reopening anguish https://www.overlawyered.com/2014/10/pennsylvania-bill-enable-victims-sue-offender-reopening-anguish/ Chronicling the high cost of our legal system Mon, 20 Oct 2014 13:51:53 +0000 hourly 1 By: C https://www.overlawyered.com/2014/10/pennsylvania-bill-enable-victims-sue-offender-reopening-anguish/comment-page-1/#comment-309226 Sun, 19 Oct 2014 23:40:58 +0000 http://overlawyered.com/?p=48956#comment-309226 This seems like a weird one. The statute itself might not be unconstitutional on its face – it DOES, after all, prohibit “conduct”. But if it’s applied in a manner that would actually prohibit a speech by a convict that doesn’t even mention his crime or the victim (and that sort of speech is apparently what triggered lawmakers to write and pass the bill) then that application is not even close to being constitutional.

But I’m really struggling to come up with a situation where this law actually COULD be applied (constitutionally) for something that’s not already covered under other laws. If you were to break someone’s leg, get convicted quickly and get out on probation, and then re-break it the day before the cast was supposed to come off, that would certainly be “conduct which perpetuates the continuing effect of the crime on the victim” and nobody would say that should be allowed, but you wouldn’t need this law to go after them for that. And “intentional infliction of emotional distress” is already a cause of action, right?

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