Elonis v. United States

Issue: (1) Whether, as a matter of statutory or constitutional law, liability under 18 U.S.C. 875(c) requires an analysis of whether a reasonable person would be threatened by the communication, or whether it is instead sufficient to examine whether a particular recipient, whether reasonable or not, would have considered it threatening; and (2) whether an erroneous pre-trial holding that the defendant's subjective mental state is not an element of the crime, followed by jury instructions and government argument to the same effect, can be harmless error.