The Virginia Supreme Court maintained its position regarding the first conviction for illegal spamming on Friday, reaffirming that the state’s anti-spamming law does not by any means restrict the right to free-speech.

Jeremy Jaynes, who is a Raleigh, North Carolina resident, will serve nine years in prison for his 2003 felony, when he made the top 10 spammers list after sending over 50,000 messages in just three days through an AOL server in Loudoun County, Virginia.

The reason the man was judged in Virginia was directly connected to the fact that he sent the e-mail through AOL’s server in Virginia. Almost all U.S. states however have anti-spamming laws, but it is for the first time that someone actually got convicted for that.

Jaynes, who is believed to have sent a total of 10 million messages between July and August 2003, which brought him an estimated $750,000 a month, was sentenced in 2004 by a Loudoun County jury, despite his lawyers’ claims that the Virginia Computer Crimes Act violated the federal Commerce Clause in the Constitution.

However, the defense’s claims were rejected by Virginia’s Supreme Court due to the fact that Jaynes used fake e-mail addresses, which went against the anti-spamming law (which stipulates the recipients should be given a mean to contact the sender), in other words, scamming people and then trying to invoke the First Amendment isn’t going to work.

“This is a historic victory in the fight against online crime,” state Attorney General Bob McDonnell said in a statement. “Spam not only clogs e-mail inboxes and destroys productivity, it also defrauds citizens and threatens the online revolution that is so critical to Virginia’s economic prosperity.”

The 4-3 decision was regarded as unjust by the defense lawyer Thomas Wolf: “Unfortunately, the state that gave birth to the First Amendment has, with this ruling, diminished that freedom for all of us … The statute criminalizes sending bulk anonymous e-mail, even for the purpose of petitioning the government or promoting religion.”