other people would reevaluate their positions with Selective Service, with the armed forces, and reevaluate their place in the culture of today, to hopefully consider my position." On January 24, 1968, the Supreme Court determined that the 1965 amendment was constitutional as enacted and as applied, and that it did not distinguish between public or private destruction or mutilation of the draft card. They determined that there was nothing necessarily expressive in the burning of a draft card. Chief Justice Earl Warren said, "we cannot accept the view that an apparently limitless variety of conduct can be labeled 'speech' whenever the person engaging in the conduct intends thereby to express an idea." O'Brien's previous sentence of six years was upheld. The Supreme Court's conclusion was criticized by legal observers such as Dean Alfange Jr. for its "astonishingly cavalier" treatment. Many saw in O'Brien's act a clear communicative element with the "intent to convey a particularized message", an intent to which the court did not give much weight. Instead, the court weighed as greater the government's interest "in assuring the continued availability of issued Selective Service certificates." In 1975, legal scholar John Hart Ely found fault with O'Brien. He pointed out that the draft-card-burning question was not decided in relation to the similar one surrounding the act of flag burning; an issue which the court had avoided for years. Ely's analysis was aided by that of Thomas Scanlon in 1972, in A Theory of Freedom of Expression, which interpreted the freedom of speech broadly, including such public and political acts as self-immolation. In 1990 O'Brien was analyzed again by critics following the case United States v. Eichman which determined that flag burning was a form of free speech, and some made comparisons to the earlier 1984 case Clark v. Community for Creative Non-Violence which determined that sleeping at a protest rally location in a downtown park was valid as a symbolic expression intended to bring attention to the plight of the homeless. These expansive interpretations of the freedom of speech appeared large enough to include draft-card burning. The position taken in O'Brien was that the individual's right to freedom of speech did not limit the government in prohibiting harmful conduct. However, the harmful conduct of burning a draft card did not have the normal test applied: it was not determined to be a case of "clear and present danger". In 1996,