SHAC Doesn’t Learn Their Lesson

Some of you may remember this post from a while back. In it, I detailed the activities of Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty (SHAC), a group dedicated to shutting down Huntington Laboratories. The labs in question conduct research involving animals, and SHAC maintains that these experiments cause great suffering to the creatures involved. One of SHAC’s more notorious tactics has been the posting of the personal information of Huntington’s employees on their website. They also target the employees of any company that does business with SHAC, right down to the people who mop their floors. This has resulted in some real harm being done to the targeted people, including threats and vandalism. SHAC of course maintains that they are only exercising their first amendment rights by posting this information, and claim ignorance of any harassment that results. Thankfully, the courts didn’t see it that way. They held that SHAC’s activities crossed the line from political protest to terroristic threats, and sentenced six of the persons who maintained SHAC’s website to federal prison terms. As might be expected, SHAC is still defiant, with the convicted persons trying desperately to portray themselves as first amendment martyrs to the leftist press. SHAC has also pressed on with its campaign of harassment, recently publishing the personal information of persons who work for Huntington’s accounting firm. Hopefully, the convicted members of SHAC will soon have some company in the federal prison system.