Threat note was lyrics, suspect says

EDWARDSVILLE – Johnny Cash sang about having shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Bob Marley belted out that he had shot the local sheriff, but not the deputy.

Now, an aspiring artist accused of threatening a Virginia Tech-like shooting rampage is evoking reggae singer Marley and “The Man in Black” in a legal test of violent lyrics that’s playing out in a southwestern Illinois courtroom.

The key piece of evidence in the case against Olutosin Oduwole is a note found more than two years ago in his disabled car demanding payment to a PayPal account, threatening “if this account doesn’t reach $50,000in the next 7 days then a murderous rampage similar to the VT shooting will occur at another highly populated university. THIS IS NOT A JOKE!”

At the time, Oduwole was a student at Southern Illinois University’s Edwardsville campus, and authorities said they found ammunition in his car and a loaded handgun in his on-campus apartment.

Oduwole’s attorneys insist that his writings were harmless lyrics, and they pressed a judge Thursday to throw out the threat charge on free-speech grounds. The judge deferred a ruling in the case. Prosecutors counter there was little wiggle room in interpreting the note, found four months after a student killed 32 people and injured 25 before killing himself on Virginia Tech’s campus.

“It’s a very, very messy area,” said David Hudson, a lawyer and scholar with the First Amendment Center, a Nashville, Tenn.-based free speech education organization. “True threat jurisprudence remains a muddled mess because lower courts apply different standards.”

Oduwole’s attorneys have cast it all as a misunderstanding, at times insisting his legal troubles were traceable to his foreign-sounding last name – Oduwole is a U.S. citizen with a Nigerian passport – and the “terror shock” they said gripped the country.

“This is not a hard case. This is not an ivory tower legal abstract,” Oduwole attorney Jeffrey Urdangen told Madison County Circuit Judge Richard Tognarelli on Thursday. “You cannot criminalize free speech.”