A woman who threatened that she was going to kill the Vice President in a private conversation with her husband has been arrested and charged. Her husband was in prison at the time, and the conversation took place through a communication service provided by the prison. Authorities have charged a Florida nurse with threatening to kill Vice President Kamala Harris. The Florida Office of Inspector General notified the Secret Service on March 3 that Niviane Petit Phelps, 39, had reportedly made threats to Harris' life while speaking to her incarcerated husband via JPay, an app that provides communication tools to prisoners. "Kamala Harris, you are going to die," Phelps allegedly says in one video sent to her husband on Feb. 14 via JPay, according to the complaint filed in a southern Florida district court. "Your days are numbered already." She stated that someone had paid her $53,000 to do the "job." https://www.foxnews.com/us/florida-nurse-vp-harris-threats-charged She was an African American woman. This woman probably, in her stupidity, had a belief that once Kamala Harris got into the White House, she would start correcting all the criminal justice problems in the country that had plagued black people. (Of course she wouldn't have blamed Biden, being an elderly white male, she wouldn't have expected anything from him. She probably placed all her hopes on Harris and viewed it as a betrayal, so she was venting out irrational anger) I don't entirely know how I feel about this. On the one hand, it does seem a little bit disturbing that this woman said she was paid a specific amount of money to kill the Vice President. On the other hand, given the situation, it seems very unlikely that this woman was not just making up a story in an emotional state out of anger, in a private conversation with her husband who was obviously unable to take part in any crime at that point. I think we should feel uneasy about statements made in casual conversations being criminalized, whether they are made in anger, or humor. I think everyone can agree it should be a crime to communicate that you are willing to pay someone money to murder someone else, or to threaten someone that you will murder them if they do not do something, so there is not exactly absolute freedom of speech, but that is not exactly what happened here. I see a slippery slope here, with what sort of things are interpreted to be "criminal threats". And ultimately the precedent that will set with private conversations and free speech. And obviously this story implies there are people listening in to conversations between prisoners and their families.
