Can spammers get away with illegal activities? Sure they can! If you thought the anti-spam law was enough to get the most notorious spammers convicted, think again. According to a Virginia Supreme Court decision, the state’s anti-spam law is unconstitutional, breaking First Amendment rights to free and anonymous speech.

The result of that is that Jeremy Jaynes, who was convicted of spam, will now be free of charge. According to Justice G. Steven Agee, the law is unconstitutional as it not only restricts commercial e-mails, but it also prohibits unsolicited e-mails, therefore violating the right to anonymous speech, which is protected by the First Amendment.

Jeremy Jaynes is a prolific American spammer, who got convicted in 2004 for sending hundreds of thousands of junk e-mails from his home in North Carolina, which earned him an estimated $24 million. He was sentenced to nine years in prison.

According to court documents, Jaynes used several computers, routers and servers to send over 10,000 e-mails within a 24-hour period to AOL subscribers on three separate occasions. Police investigators found at his home in North Carolina a cache of CDs storing over 176 million full e-mail addresses and 1.3 billion e-mail user names.

The court ruled that the anti-spam statute used to convict Jaynes “is unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

The reactions were of course as expected: dismissing the anti-spam law as unconstitutional is like giving burglars the right to enter our homes just because they recite the Gettysburg Address, as Jon Praed of the Internet Law Group pointed out in an interview with the Washington Post. And he is just one of the many who believe the court took the wrong decision.