LUTHMANN NOTE: Here’s the bottom line. You don’t need to like Paul Boyne. You don’t need to defend his words. But you do need to demand that judges follow the Constitution. Article VI is not optional. It is the rule. Boyne’s prison call hits one point over and over—if the speech was protected, the case never should have existed. That means warrants fail. Charges fail. Convictions fail. And the judge fails. If that’s true, this isn’t just a bad ruling. It’s a system-wide breach of oath. And that’s a much bigger story. This piece is “Brown Violated Supremacy Clause,” first available on TheFamilyCourtCircus.com.
By The Underground Man
The Call From Walker
(CONNECTICUT, USA) – I have listened to enough jail calls to know when a man wants pity. On an April 21 recorded call from the Walker Reception and Special Management Unit, Paul Boyne did not ask for pity. He asked for Article VI. He wanted to know what a judicial officer is. He wanted to know whether a prosecutor counts.
Then he drove to the real point. Everyone who touched his case swore to support the Constitution. In Boyne’s telling, that oath should have stopped the case cold once state power moved against speech.
He kept circling one hard idea. If the speech was protected, no official in the chain had lawful cover.
That call sent me straight to the Acts of the Apostles. Saint Peter sat in prison while the church prayed. An angel came by night. The chains fell. The iron gate opened. Saint Peter walked out and only then grasped that the rescue was real. Acts 12:5–12.
Paul Boyne is not Saint Peter. I am not making a holiness argument. I am making a scene-setting one.
A man sits in a concrete box. He says the state chained him for words. He keeps demanding that someone read the text that governs the building. No angel has opened that gate yet. The only key he keeps naming is the Constitution.
Brown Violated Supremacy Clause: A Judge’s Oath Broken?
Article VI is not wallpaper. It says the Constitution, federal laws, and treaties are the supreme law of the land. It says, “the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby.” It also says all state executive and judicial officers are bound by oath.
The Supreme Court has repeated the point for decades. State courts have both the power and the duty to enforce federal rights. They cannot duck those rights because state policy points another way. That is black-letter law. See U.S. Const. art. VI, cls. 2–3; Testa v. Katt, 330 U.S. 386 (1947); Howlett v. Rose, 496 U.S. 356 (1990).
That matters here because New Haven Judge Peter Brown did not preside over a small state-law squabble. He presided over a prosecution in Connecticut where the state’s theory collided with the First Amendment.
Prosecutors led by John P. Doyle Jr. said Boyne authored posts that threatened three judges, revealed their home details, and fell outside constitutional protection. A jury later convicted Boyne on 12 counts of first-degree stalking and 6 counts of electronic stalking.
But the federal baseline still came from Counterman v. Colorado, 600 U.S. 66 (2023), where the Supreme Court held that a true-threat prosecution requires proof that the speaker consciously disregarded a substantial risk that his words would be taken as threatening violence. Ugly speech does not cancel that rule. It makes the rule harder and, more importantly, to apply.
Brown Violated Supremacy Clause: The Record is Damning
The timeline is brutal. Connecticut extradited Boyne from Virginia in October 2023. By February 2026, during jury selection in New Haven, Brown had raised Boyne’s bond by $500,000 in each of the three pending cases after prosecutors said Boyne emailed a revised witness list to a Virginia State Police member. That drove the increase to $1.5 million.
Boyne’s lawyers argued the increase violated his constitutional rights because bail exists to secure appearance and protect safety, not to punish. Brown later reduced the bond back to its original level. That sequence matters. It looked less like neutral risk management and more like a court sending a message.
Then came the verdict. On March 10, the state announced that a jury found Boyne guilty on all 18 counts. Sentencing is set for May 26. The official record says prosecutors tied Boyne to the site, showed he authored posts aimed at three judges, and argued those posts contained true threats, anti-Semitic language, photos, addresses, and descriptions of homes. The jury accepted that theory.
I am not whitewashing this record. The state has one. But the conviction does not erase the oath problem. Brown buried Counterman inside a 145-page charge and let the state call speech itself “conduct.” Boyne and his critics’ prose is hot. The constitutional issue is cold. It is whether a state judge faithfully applied the federal floor.
A federal judge did not resolve that issue on the merits. In 2024, Boyne’s habeas petition was dismissed under Younger v. Harris, 401 U.S. 37 (1971). That was abstention, not endorsement. The district court refused to stop an ongoing state prosecution. It did not hold Brown right on the First Amendment.
Meanwhile, Connecticut’s own Appellate Court has already said that speech alone cannot be converted into stalking or harassment when the speech does not fit a recognized unprotected category. See State v. Billings, 287 A.3d 146 (Conn. App. Ct. 2022). Courts in Illinois and D.C. drew similar limits in People v. Relerford, 2017 IL 121094, 104 N.E.3d 341, and Mashaud v. Boone, 295 A.3d 1139 (D.C. 2023).
Brown was not wandering in a fog. The map was on his desk.
Brown Violated Supremacy Clause: The Oath He Can Not Evade
This is why I keep coming back to Brown. Boyne’s prison theory sprawls. He names lawmakers, governors, warrants, extradition papers, and prosecutors. Fine. But Brown is the cleanest Article VI problem because Clause 2 names judges outright. Brown had the last live chance to stop a state prosecution from outrunning federal limits.
If he punished speech that Counterman protected, or let a jury convict without a faithful federal standard, then he did not just make a hard call. He put state power ahead of the supreme law. That is the Supremacy Clause problem in plain English. It is why Boyne’s prison call keeps landing on the same target.
Boyne also keeps invoking 18 U.S.C. § 241. I do not toss that around for theater. The Ku Klux Klan Act makes it a felony for two or more people to conspire to injure, threaten, oppress, or intimidate someone in the free exercise of rights secured by the Constitution or federal law. The U.S. Department of Justice says the statute is aimed at civil-rights conspiracies.
Intent is the hinge. If officials knowingly coordinated to punish Boyne for protected speech, Boyne is pointing at a real federal hook. If intent cannot be proved, the theory dies there. Either way, he is not inventing a phantom. He is reading a live federal criminal statute from a prison phone and asking whether anyone else in the room has.
I do not ask anyone to love Boyne’s words. The state’s evidence, if credited, painted him as vile, reckless, and cruel. I ask for something smaller. I ask whether judges still mean the oath.
Saint Peter in Acts walked past the guards when the gate gave way. Boyne sits in a Connecticut cell and tells callers to read Article VI over breakfast. Maybe that sounds mad. Maybe it sounds lonely.
To me, it sounds like the one question that now matters. Brown swore before he ruled. The Constitution came first. It still does.
