ST. PAUL, Minn. — The lawyer for a Bethel Seminary student charged with making terroristic threats by scrawling a racist message on his pickup truck said he’s prepared to defend his client on free-speech grounds.

Thomas Glander’s attorney, Robert Fowler, said driving around in a vehicle bearing racist graffiti is little different from driving a vehicle with an offensive bumper sticker. He said such an act is protected by the First Amendment.

“If he’s expressing an unpopular viewpoint — tough. Ninety-nine percent of people may not like the content, but it does not rise to a threat,” Fowler said after Glander’s court appearance June 26.

Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner declined to respond in detail to Fowler’s statements. “We are not going to try this case in the media,” she said. “We are confident the charges will stand or we would not have filed them.”

Fowler said he considers Glander’s case the state’s most significant free-speech case since R.A.V. v. St. Paul, in which the U.S. Supreme Court in 1992 struck down as unconstitutional an ordinance St. Paul used to prosecute a cross-burning case.

Mike Steenson, a constitutional law professor at William Mitchell College of Law, said Glander’s case is different. The St. Paul ordinance at issue in R.A.V., he said, singled out for punishment “one certain class of speech or expressive conduct” directed toward certain classes of people, while the state’s terroristic threat statute is neutral. Steenson said he does not see a First Amendment defense in Glander’s case.

But Guy Charles, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, does. If a court were to convict Glander under the terroristic threat statute, he said, “I think there would be a very good argument that the First Amendment is violated.”

Charles said a terroristic threat is when someone walks into a building and threatens to shoot the occupants, or someone says, “I’ve got a gun, give me your money.” An individual traveling around in his car with racist graffiti on it for a couple of days does not seem to qualify as a violent, imminent and likely threat, he said.

But at Bethel College and Seminary in Arden Hills — a campus that had experienced six incidents of hateful graffiti since last fall — Glander’s actions were certain to raise alarm, Gaertner said earlier this month when her office charged him.

Glander has not been charged in the other incidents.

According to the criminal complaint, on May 6, Glander complained to the sheriff’s office that someone had written racist language and swastikas on his pickup while it was parked near his on-campus residence.

The message, which included a misspelling, said, in part, “We kill pig chaplans” and used a crude racial slur for blacks.

Bethel officials grew concerned when the graffiti remained on the vehicle two days later, and received permission from the sheriff’s office to clean it off. In an e-mail to a college administrator, Glander complained about the graffiti on his pickup. He also complained about it being cleaned it off.

Glander later admitted to a Sheriff’s lieutenant he was responsible for the writing on his vehicle. His reasons weren’t entirely clear, according to the complaint, but he said he was angry at campus security for ignoring complaints that he had been harassed, those who were targeting minorities on campus, college administrators who weren’t preventing the graffiti and a faculty member who refused to help him when he needed academic assistance.

Glander denied responsibility for previous and subsequent racial graffiti.