In retrospect, a Miami student’s interview with a reporter — in which he described his threat to kill the president as “pretty funny” — was ill-advised, considering he’d expressed remorse to a judge only a month earlier at a probation hearing.
The resulting newspaper article in The Reporter, the Miami Dade College’s student newspaper, prompted a judge to toughen Joaquin Serrapio’s probation because “the original conditions were not sufficient to accomplish the purposes of probation.” The modifications included eight more months in home confinement and 45 days in a halfway house.
Serrapio appealed the increased sanctions because he believed “that these modifications violated his rights under the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment, the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment and the First Amendment.” In a ruling handed down last week though, the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the district court’s modified probation as constitutional.