'Civil death,' denial of tort claims, violates prisoners' right of access to courts, R.I. high court holds

N.C. State Archives public domain photo via Wikimedia Commons

The Rhode Island Supreme Court in March struck down the state "civil death" statute, which disallowed civil claims by inmates imprisoned for life.

The statute at issue states:

Every person imprisoned in the adult correctional institutions for life shall, with respect to all rights of property, to the bond of matrimony and to all civil rights and relations of any nature whatsoever, be deemed to be dead in all respects, as if his or her natural death had taken place at the time of conviction. However, the bond of matrimony shall not be dissolved, nor shall the rights to property or other rights of the husband or wife of the imprisoned person be terminated or impaired, except on the entry of a lawfully obtained decree for divorce.

Alleging negligent maintenance, one plaintiff-inmate complained "that his arm was severely burned and permanently disfigured when he made contact with an exposed hot water pipe at the [prison]." Another alleged negligence when he slipped and fell after being compelled "to walk across an icy walkway at the [prison]." The trial court rejected both claims as barred by the "civil death" statute.

I was shocked to read of this case in my home state's Providence Journal; I never had heard of a "civil death" statute. The R.I. ACLU provided some background:

Rhode Island was apparently the only state in the country still enforcing a law like this, whose origins date back to ancient English common law. As far back as 1976, a court struck down Missouri's civil death statute, noting that "the concept of civil death has been condemned by virtually every court and commentator to study it over the last thirty years." The court observed that such laws had been characterized even before then as "archaic," "outmoded," "an outdated and inscrutable common law precept," and "a medieval fiction in a modern world." In 1937, when 18 states still had civil death laws, a law review article called the concept "outworn."

Applying the 1843 state constitution (article 1, section 5), a four-justice majority of the Rhode Island Supreme Court had little trouble reaching the conclusion that I thought was obvious, that the law violates the fundamental due process right of access to the courts.

Justice Lynch Prata
(via Ballotpedia)

Employing strict scrutiny, the court acknowledged that "civil death"

functions as an additional sanction imposed upon some of the state's worst criminals and furthers the goals of punishment and deterrence. This Court has recognized that "[t]he loss of civil status as a form of punishment is a principle that dates back to ancient societies." .... However, it is our opinion that this particular additional punishment is not a compelling reason to override the right of access to the courts that is textually guaranteed by the Rhode Island Constitution.

Justice Goldberg
(via Ballotpedia)

Even were the statute supported by a compelling state interest, it is not narrowly drawn, the court further opined, as it fails to distinguish between prisoners based on their eligibility for parole.

Justice Maureen McKenna Goldberg dissented. "Prison inmates, especially life prisoners, are not entitled to the same degree of constitutional rights as are members of society at large," she wrote, "and that includes the right to bring tort claims against the warden for a slip and fall or a burned hand." She would have narrowed the question to the plaintiffs' negligence claims and upheld the statute.

"In my more than two decades of service on this Court, I cannot recall ever having declared a statute to be unconstitutional," Justice Goldberg opined. "[T]his should not be the first case with such a drastic result in light of our longstanding jurisprudence."

The case is Zab v. R.I. Department of Corrections, No. 2019-459-Appeal (R.I. Mar. 2, 2022). Justice Erin Lynch Prata wrote the majority opinion.

A former state senator Judge Prata was nominated to the court by Governor Gina Raimondo in December 2020, just three months before she left office to become the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. Justice Lynch Prata is 2000 graduate of Catholic Law, for which I periodically teach as a visitor. Judge Goldberg is the senior-most justice on the court, having served since her appointment in 1997.

Mass. anti-panhandling law violates First Amendment

Flickr by Alex Proimos CC BY-NC 2.0

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court yesterday struck down a state anti-panhandling statute as a facially unconstitutional violation of the freedom of speech.

Disparate treatment of solicitation was the statute's fatal flaw.  The law exempted newspaper sales and police-permitted nonprofit solicitations in public streets.  The disparity proved the statute to be a content-based speech restriction that could not withstand First Amendment strict scrutiny in a public forum.

The case arose from prosecution of two low-income men in Fall River, Massachusetts, who, with "homeless" signs, solicited donations from passing motorists.  They were jailed for summons and probation violations, respectively, following criminal complaints initiated by police.

The district attorney conceded the unconstitutionality of the statute at least as applied, but Fall River and its chief of police defended the law.  The statute pertains broadly to signaling or stopping a vehicle "for the purpose of soliciting any alms, contribution or subscription or of selling any merchandise," a probably permissible scope.  But the law raises a content-based free speech problem when, subsequently, it purports to exempt newspaper sales and nonprofit solicitations.

Applying strict scrutiny, the Court ruled the law both overinclusive and underinclusive.  The law would punish speech that poses no threat to public safety while also exempting speech that threatens public safety no differently from panhandling.  Underinclusiveness, the Court observed, is additionally problematic in strict scrutiny because it undermines the compelling state interest asserted in defense of the statute.

The Court refused efforts to save the statute by partial invalidation or severance, finding the law's "constitutional infirmities ... pervasive."  The district attorney would have had the Court invalidate the statute only insofar as it prohibits solicitation of donations, rather than commercial transactions.  But that's too fine a line, the Court ruled.  The difficulty of distinguishing car-side commercial exchanges from noncommercial interactions would chill permissible speech intolerably.

Severing the exemptions also was a non-starter.  The law would then prohibit signaling or stopping cars for nearly any reason, including political expression that lies at the core of First Amendment protection.  Such a broad prohibition was not the legislature's intent, the Court reasoned.  Comparing the instant case with First Amendment precedents in this respect, the Court found the anti-panhandling law more akin to the expansive yard-sign prohibition struck down in City of Ladue v. Gilleo (U.S. 1994) than to the robocall exception narrowly invalidated by the Supreme Court in July.

By my estimation, it is possible for the Commonwealth legislature to chart a constitutional course for a car-side anti-panhandling law in Massachusetts.  But it will be a navigation between Scylla and Charybdis.  A law that will satisfy the Court should anchor itself in public safety and not distinguish among the motives of actors who may approach cars in live traffic lanes.

The case is Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless v. City of Fall River, No. SJC-12914 (Dec. 15, 2020).  Justice Barbara A. Lenk authored the opinion of a unanimous Court.

Amid pandemic, ballot access restrictions yield to right to run for office, state supreme court rules

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, political candidates will have to produce only half the usual number of voter signatures to see their names on the state primary ballot, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled Friday.  One justice in concurrence chastised the Massachusetts government for dropping the ball in technology to respond to the crisis.

Massachusetts primary ballots in 2016 (GPA Photo Archive CC BY-SA 2.0)

A primary election in the United States occurs at the state level before the nationwide Election Day in early November.  Voters in a primary election choose which candidates from each party will qualify for the final ballot on Election Day.  The Commonwealth of Massachusetts held its primary election for the U.S. Presidency on March 3; the primary election for state candidates to state and federal offices is set for September 1.  Candidates will vie for a U.S. Senate seat, nine U.S. House seats, 40 state senate seats, and 160 state house seats.  Some states with earlier scheduled elections postponed their primaries.  For example, Rhode Island postponed its same-day presidential and state primary election from April 28 to June 2.  The later timetable in Massachusetts leaves no room for postponement if officials are to prepare ballots timely for Election Day.

Declared on March 10, a state of emergency arose in Massachusetts at a crucial time for political candidates to collect signatures to qualify for ballots in the state primary election.  Party candidates were expected to submit signatures to state officials by April 28, for state offices, and by May 5, for federal offices.  The requisite number of signatures ranges from 150, for a state house seat, to 10,000, for a U.S. Senate seat.  Procured signatures in Massachusetts must be “wet,” that is, given live, in ink; there is not yet a legal process to collect, nor a technical capacity to certify, electronic signatures.

Customers line up at social distance to enter my local grocery store.

Photo in Barrington, R.I., Apr. 5, 2020, by RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-SA 4.0.

Naturally the coronavirus lockdown has complicated the collection of wet signatures.  Candidates and their supporters ordinarily canvass voters door to door and at places where people congregate, such as shopping malls.  Social distancing restrictions came into effect just after the halfway point in the time window for collecting signatures.  Candidates sought relief from the executive and legislative branches of Massachusetts government.  Executive election officials said they were powerless to change statutory deadlines, and bills to relax signature requirements stalled in the legislature.  I note, it’s hardly in the interest of incumbents and their well-oiled politicking machines to facilitate the raising up of rivals.

Written or not, the right to seek representative office must be, to some degree, a civil, or human, right in a democracy.  In Massachusetts, the right is written.  Article 9 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights states, “All elections ought to be free; and all the inhabitants of this commonwealth, having such qualifications as they shall establish by their frame of government, have an equal right to elect officers, and to be elected, for public employments.”

Article 9 of the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution
(Massachusetts Historical Society Collection)

The provision dates, unaltered, to the original 1780 Massachusetts Constitution (Papers of John Adams, vol. 8) and gave candidates now seeking access to the Massachusetts primary a plain hook to plead for judicial intervention.  On April 8, three representative plaintiffs, including two Democrats and one Republican, two seeking federal office and one seeking state office, filed an emergency petition for declaratory relief.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has long recognized that the state constitutional right to run for office may confer judicial protection against overreaching legislative or executive restrictions on access to the ballot.  The provision was used to support women’s suffrage in 1922, if only after the 19th Amendment (1920).  The Court rejected a ballot access challenge to statute by Libertarian candidates in 2012; however, in dictum the Court reiterated its competence to adjudicate an article 9 claim and even cited article 9 in tandem with the inherent judicial power, as articulated in the landmark same-sex marriage decision in 2003, to extend Massachusetts civil rights beyond the scope of the U.S. Constitution.  Notwithstanding the power of judicial review, the Court’s experience in examining ballot access law under article 9 has before now resulted entirely in the approval of “reasonable” or “legitimate” qualifications for office.

Structurally, the Massachusetts Constitution, like the U.S. Constitution, disfavors judicial intervention in the electoral process.  “As a general matter, the principle of separation of powers … prevents the ‘judiciary [from] substituting its notions of correct policy for that of a popularly elected Legislature,’” the Court wrote in the instant case, quoting precedent.  The plaintiffs’ challenge here called for “policy judgments that, in ordinary times would be best left to the Legislature.”

"Signing a Petition" by Elizabeth Jenkins CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Yet, the Court wrote, “[n]o fair-minded person can dispute that the fundamental right to run for elective office has been unconstitutionally burdened or interfered with by the need to obtain the required ‘wet’ signatures in the midst of this pandemic.”  Had the legislature passed a law similarly burdening ballot access in the absence of the pandemic, the Court reasoned, surely it would be ripe for judicial review under article 9.  Thus, “where fundamental constitutional rights are violated, and where the Legislature fails to remedy the constitutional deficiencies after having had the opportunity to do so, and where an aggrieved litigant files suit seeking remedial relief for the constitutional violation, the judiciary must provide such a remedy.”

The Court struggled with the appropriate level of judicial scrutiny, an issue that similarly has confounded the U.S. Supreme Court in its case law over free speech and campaign finance regulation.  U.S. constitutional law tends to approach civil rights problems from a formalist framework of tiered judicial scrutiny, its intensity ranging from zero, or minimal “rational basis” analysis, to presumptive unconstitutionality and stringent “strict scrutiny.”  This framework at first glance contrasts with the much more flexible European approach that functionalizes construction of “necessary in a democratic society,” though critics fairly allege that the U.S. Supreme Court’s tiered scrutiny has flexed functionally in application.

"Magnifying Glass" by Tall Chris CC BY 2.0

Like the U.S. Supreme Court, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has employed the language of both strict scrutiny and rational, or “legitimate” basis, in article 9 jurisprudence.  The Court explained: “When we evaluate the constitutionality of a restriction on access to the ballot, we apply a ‘sliding scale approach, … through which [we] weigh the character and magnitude of the burden the State’s rule imposes on the plaintiffs’ rights against the interests the State contends justify that burden, and consider the extent to which the State’s concerns make the burden necessary.’”  In other words, the degree of scrutiny is elevated as a function of the degree of burden.  Critics such as me contend that setting the appropriate degree of scrutiny only after purporting to observe the degree of burden invites the tail to wag the dog.  But that’s not important just now.  The Court found the burden here to be high enough, whatever language might be used to describe it, to demand strict scrutiny.

Though signature requirements might be modest and legitimate burdens on ballot access in the best of times, the Court opined that the signature requirements are excessively burdensome amid the present pandemic.  To reach that conclusion, the Court equated evolving social context with emergency electoral context:

[A]s we have recognized, statutory requirements that were once considered constitutionally permissible may later be found to interfere significantly with a fundamental right as societal conditions and technology change [indirectly citing the aforementioned same-sex marriage case]…. And similarly, statutory requirements that in ordinary times impose only modest burdens on prospective candidates for public office may significantly interfere with the fundamental right to run for political office in a time of pandemic.

Observers may opine whether, or when, that equation holds.  Though maybe not surprising when articulated by a progressive state court, the declaration simultaneously authorizes judicial aggrandizement in the expansion of human rights relative to time and in the constriction of human rights relative to exigency.  Potential implications abound, for example, in reconciling personal privacy with free speech, or climate change mitigation with free markets. For present purposes, the Court concluded that the signature requirements as applied could not withstand strict scrutiny.

By the time it reached remedy, the Court had painted itself into a corner.  The existing signature regime could not stand, yet the executive and the legislature refuse to solve the problem.  Plaintiffs invited the Court to simply void the signature requirement on this go-around.  But the state cried caution, fairly fearing that throwing open the doors of ballot access would result in incomprehensible ballot chaos for voters.  I would be inclined to find the state’s position paternalistic, but I remember hanging chads.

By Maklay62 at Pixabay

Admittedly loath to parse numbers, the Court invoked a Solomonic solution.  Observing that the emergency arose at about the halfway point of signature collection, the Court cut signature requirements by 50%.  The state had suggested that the requirement be cut only for offices requiring 1,000 or more signatures, presumably because of the chaos-will-reign concern, not the incumbency-will-be-threatened concern.  The bills stalled in the legislature would have taken that approach, too, reducing signatures from whatever number over 1,000 by half or two-thirds.  But the Court found itself without a sufficient basis to adopt the 1,000-signature cut-off, so applied the 50% rule across the board.

The Court issued two further declarations of equitable relief.  It extended the deadlines for candidates to submit signatures for state certification from April 28 to May 5, for state offices, and from May 5 to June 2, for federal offices, taking into account the pleadings of the state as to the minimal time needed to prepare ballots.  Second, the Court ordered state election officials to find a way to accept and certify electronic rather than wet signatures.  These additional measures the Court calculated in recognition of the difficulty, but not impossibility, of continuing to collect voter signatures during the lockdown.

Justice Kafker (Mass.gov)

Only one judge wrote a separate opinion.  In concurrence, Associate Justice Scott L. Kafker chastised the state for falling behind the curve in electoral technology:

In this “high tech” era, and in the midst of a global pandemic that severely restricts close personal contact, the failure to be able to solve manageable technological problems on the eve of an election is confounding and distressing. At a time when we need to be fundamentally rethinking what must be done in person and what can instead be done electronically, our electoral process seems dangerously unequipped to adapt to a new paradigm.

Justice Kafker pointed with approval to the electronic voter registration system adopted in Arizona.  The Court opinion in a footnote had pointed to Arizona similarly, as well as to technological adaptations in electoral process in New Jersey and Florida in response to the pandemic.

Justice Kafker concluded:

I feel compelled to emphasize that those responsible for our election process must have the necessary tools to quickly adapt to the current pandemic and the future crises to follow. Absent such technological adaptability, our elections will be imperiled and our election laws may themselves have to be rewritten in the midst of a crisis, as was done here. That is an invitation to conflict and confusion that must be avoided.

Voters line up in Boxborough, Mass., in the 2016 primary.

Photo by Liz West CC BY 2.0.

To read between those lines an entreaty to the legislature for funding would not, I think, be too speculative.  Lawyers and judges especially are aware of how badly Massachusetts has lagged behind other states in digitizing legal practice and public access to court records.

It would not be a stretch moreover to suppose that Justice Kafker was especially pained to meddle with the specific numeric qualifications for ballot access.  He was appointed to the Supreme Judicial Court in 2017 by Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican.  In the course of his career, Justice Kafker served as deputy legal counsel to Governor Bill Weld.  A past Libertarian candidate for Vice President and outsider Republican candidate for President, Weld was challenging President Donald Trump for the 2020 Republican nomination until Weld suspended his campaign on March 18. Republicans identify with formalism in constitutional interpretation, and Libertarians identify with judicial restraint in rule making, if also, practically, with relaxation of ballot access restrictions.

At the same time, Justice Kafker’s conclusion might readily be understood to voice widespread American anxiety over electoral integrity in general, especially in the crosscurrents of equivocal Washington reaction to Russian tampering.

The case is Goldstein v. Secretary of the Commonwealth, No. SJC-12931 (Mass. Apr. 17, 2020).  Chief Justice Ralph D. Gants authored the unanimous opinion.

Public officials must know religious freedom gets strict scrutiny, so lose qualified immunity in civil rights case over church access

In a civil rights case involving the freedom of religion, the Massachusetts Appeals Court today denied qualified immunity to public officials who prevented the employee-plaintiff from going to church for Christmas, even without a plain prior case on similar facts.  The decision has important implications across the field of qualified immunity and "constitutional tort," because civil rights plaintiffs routinely claim violations of fundamental rights that officials should know trigger strict scrutiny in constitutional law.

St. Michael's Chapel at Chelsea Soldiers' Home
By Randall Armor, Boston's Hidden Sacred Spaces (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Teresa Krupien was working at the Soldiers' Home in Chelsea, a veterans' healthcare facility.  Another employee reported that Krupien injured the other's wrist when the two were moving a patient into a wheelchair.  After investigation, and upon mixed conclusions among officials, Krupien was issued a "stay-away directive," barring her from the home premises.  Krupien promptly informed officials that the directive would prevent her from attending Christmas services at the chapel, her "spiritual home," and alleged in her civil rights complaint that the directive in sum barred her from church services for 37 days.  Officials for that time refused to modify the directive.

The trial court dismissed claims under the Massachusetts civil rights act on grounds of qualified immunity, and the Appeals Court reversed.  Qualified immunity pertains when (1) a plaintiff complains of a public official's violation of statutory or constitutional rights, (2) the plaintiff's right was clearly established at the time of the alleged violation, and (3) a reasonable person in the shoes of the defendant would have understood that plaintiff's rights were clearly violated.  Qualified immunity is an important defense in the law of "constitutional tort," because torts with public-official defendants usually must rise to the level of civil rights violations in order to overcome sovereign immunity, which is absolute unless waived.

The argument in qualified immunity usually centers on the second element, with an assist from the third, the two forming something like a "reasonable belief" test.  Public officials, who bear the burden of proof of immunity, invariably argue that they were clueless about any clear violation because never before have the courts had a case quite like this one.  Plaintiffs invariably respond by saying that of course this has never happened before, but come on, a lot of cases just like this have happened.  Where element two is hard on plaintiffs with its clarity requirement, element three gives plaintiffs an assist by testing officials' denial objectively.  Many a commentator has noted that the odd yet defensible effect of this rule is to give public officials a pass on a kind of civil rights offense once--but only once.

True to form, defendants here argued that no precedent provided clear guidance to officials on how to handle Krupien's desire to go to church.  Nevertheless, the court opined, ample precedents demonstrate that struct scrutiny applies to claims of free religious exercise.  And strict scrutiny, a public official should know, tests for narrow tailoring to achieve a legitimate state interest.  Officials here had no evidence that Krupien's attendance at church would jeopardize anyone's safety.  It would have been a simple matter to narrow the order and let her attend worship services.

Judge Posner at Harvard Law
By chensiyuan (CC BY-SA-2.5)

The appeals court pointed to an oft-cited lamentation of renowned jurist, sometimes-"consummate ass," advocate-for-the-downtrodden-whilst-né-Circuit-Judge Richard Posner, in which he pointed out that the lack of case law spelling out the impermissibility of selling a child into slavery cannot mean that a defendant gets one free pass to do so.  Wrote Judge Posner in full:

Our job is the humbler one [than Congress's, in extending or abolishing immunity] of applying the immunity doctrine. We begin with the elementary proposition that it would be improper to deny immunity to a particular defendant on the ground that his conduct could be subsumed under some principle of liability in force when he acted. That approach would shrink immunity to trivial dimensions, since it is always possible to find a principle of comprehensive generality (such as "due process of law"). But the immunity doctrine as it has evolved goes much further than this to protect public officers. It is not enough, to justify denying immunity, that liability in a particular constellation of facts could have been, or even that it was, predicted from existing rules and decisions, even though law, as Holmes famously remarked, is a prediction of what courts will do faced with a particular set of facts. (Maybe it is more than that, but it is at least that.) Liability in that particular set must have been established at the time the defendant acted.

It begins to seem as if to survive a motion to dismiss a suit on grounds of immunity the plaintiff must be able to point to a previous case that differs only trivially from his case. But this cannot be right. The easiest cases don't even arise. There has never been a section 1983 case accusing welfare officials of selling foster children into slavery; it does not follow that if such a case arose, the officials would be immune from damages liability because no previous case had found liability in those circumstances.

Judge Henry
(Ballotpedia)

Murphy ex rel. K.H. v. Morgan, 914 F.2d 846, 851 (7th Cir. 1990) (paragraph break added).  The Massachusetts Appeals Court here sought to fine-tune that balance between the general principle, religious freedom, and the specific distinction between one strict-scrutiny case and the next.

The case is Krupien v. Ritcey, No. AC 17-P-870 (Sept. 26, 2018).  The opinion was authored by Associate Justice Vickie L. Henry.  A graduate of Wellesley College and Boston University Law, Judge Henry left a lucrative commercial litigation practice with Foley Hogg in 2011 to serve as senior staff attorney and youth initiative director for Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD).  In that capacity, she appeared in the consolidated cases that became Obergefell v. Hodges (U.S. 2015), establishing the federal constitutional right of gay marriage.  Judge Henry was appointed to the bench by Governor Baker in 2015.

Revenge porn law can survive First Amendment scrutiny by requiring 'actual malice'

Last week a Tyler, Texas, appellate court struck the state’s criminal revenge porn law as fatally overbroad, so facially unconstitutional, under the First Amendment to the federal Constitution.  The ruling garnered headlines heralding the unconstitutionality of revenge porn law, which could have big implications in privacy law and policy nationwide—even ramifications for U.S. foreign relations.

However, the court’s ruling was not so broad as headlines have suggested.  In fact, the court gave wise and constructive feedback on what a revenge porn law needs to look like to pass constitutional muster—which it can.  It seems in the end that the Texas law was just not well drafted.  Accordingly, the revenge porn laws that have proliferated in the United States, now in 38 states (collected at Cyber Civil Rights Initiative), should be scrutinized and, if necessary, corrected.  (Constitutional problems with Vermont and Arizona laws were mentioned just today by the U.K. Register, here.)

The Texas case, Ex parte Jones, No. 12-17-00346 (Tex. Ct. App. Apr. 18, 2018), involved a criminal information against Jones under Texas Penal Code section 21.16(b), which criminalizes the “unlawful disclosure of intimate visual materials.”  The statute reads:

A person commits an offense if:

  (1) without the effective consent of the depicted person, the person intentionally discloses visual material depicting another person with the person’s intimate parts exposed or engaged in sexual conduct;

  (2) the visual material was obtained by the person or created under circumstances in which the depicted person had a reasonable expectation that the visual material would remain private;

  (3) the disclosure of the visual material causes harm to the depicted person; and

  (4) the disclosure of the visual material reveals the identity of the depicted person in any manner[.]

The statute, section 21.16(a), furthermore defines “visual material” broadly (“any film, photograph, videotape, negative, or slide or any photographic reproduction that contains or incorporates in any manner any film, photograph, videotape, negative, or slide,” as well as electronic transmission) and “intimate parts” specifically (““the naked genitals, pubic area, anus, buttocks, or female nipple of a person”).

The court’s First Amendment analysis was sound.  The court applied de novo review to test the constitutionality of a criminal statute.  The court rejected a narrow construction that would confine the law to mere obscenity, as stringently defined by federal precedent.  Because the statute is then a content-based restriction of expressive content, the court charged the government with the burden of rebutting presumptive unconstitutionality.  The State conceded at oral argument that the law must survive strict scrutiny, i.e., advance a compelling state interest and be narrowly tailored to do so.  Intimate privacy passes muster on the first prong, but the statute facially fails narrow tailoring.  The court acknowledged that overbreadth doctrine is “strong medicine”; nevertheless, the statute could not measure up.

The court illustrated the statute’s fatal flaw with a hypothetical, unattributed so presumably original, that seems drawn from a law school or bar exam:

“Adam and Barbara are in a committed relationship. One evening, in their home, during a moment of passion, Adam asks Barbara if he can take a nude photograph of her. Barbara consents, but before Adam takes the picture, she tells him that he must not show the photograph to anyone else. Adam promises that he will never show the picture to another living soul, and takes a photograph of Barbara in front of a plain, white background with her breasts exposed.

“A few months pass, and Adam and Barbara break up after Adam discovers that Barbara has had an affair. A few weeks later, Adam rediscovers the topless photo he took of Barbara. Feeling angry and betrayed, Adam emails the photo without comment to several of his friends, including Charlie. Charlie never had met Barbara and, therefore, does not recognize her. But he likes the photograph and forwards the email without comment to some of his friends, one of whom, unbeknownst to Charlie, is Barbara’s coworker, Donna. Donna recognizes Barbara and shows the picture to Barbara’s supervisor, who terminates Barbara’s employment.”

“In this scenario,” the court observed, “Adam can be charged under Section 21.16(b), but so can Charlie and Donna.”

Therein lies the problem: not necessarily as applied to Adam, but as applied to Charlie and Donna, who are ignorant of the circumstances under which the photo came to be.  Certainly Charlie, who received the photo from Adam “without comment,” might as well believe that Adam ripped the photo of a stranger from a pornographic website.  However indecent the photo, both Charlie and Donna have a First Amendment right to communicate the photo “downstream.”  Yet without Barbara’s consent, Charlie and Donna run afoul of the revenge porn law.  Given the ease with which persons can share visual images in the age of electronic and online communication, the court found “alarming breadth” in this potential criminalization of expression.  In First Amendment overbreadth doctrine, a facially overbroad criminal law must be ruled unconstitutional even if it might be constitutional as applied to the defendant before the court.

The court distilled the law’s flaws in two dimensions related to culpability.  Typically of a criminal prohibition, the statute requires intent.  But intent pertains only to the republication of the image.  The statute does not require that the actor have “knowledge or reason to know the circumstances surrounding the material’s creation, under which the depicted person’s reasonable expectation of privacy arose.”  Second, the statute does not require “intent to harm the depicted person,” or even knowledge “of the depicted person’s identity.”  Borrowing the language of civil law (meaning common law tort), one would say that the statute requires volitional intent, but not intent to commit a wrong or to cause an injury.

The requisite intent to survive constitutional challenge may be likened to “actual malice,” which is used in both civil and criminal defamation law to describe “knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard of truth or falsity.”  In the context of revenge porn, a constitutional law might require “actual knowledge of the depicted person’s reasonable and continuing expectation of privacy in the image, or reckless disregard of same.”  If Charlie knew the identity of Barbara, so might infer the circumstances under which the photo had been taken, then the State might at least allege recklessness.  Donna, who did know Barbara’s identity, might be charged.  But she should be entitled to defend upon a qualified privilege, borrowed again from common law defamation, to share information in the interest of a recipient or third party when the defendant should disclose according to general standards of decency.  A corrected statute would hold Adam accountable without a constitutional problem.

Also just last week, the Rhode Island legislature (my home state) passed a revenge porn bill (2018-H 7452A) that has the support of the Governor Gina Raimondo (AP).  Raimondo vetoed a revenge porn bill in 2016, objecting on free speech grounds (Providence Journal).  Her position now is bolstered by the Texas decision in Jones.  Beefing up the intent requirement is precisely one of the R.I. legislative fixes that brought the latest bill to fruition.  The Rhode Island bill requires that the defendant intentionally disseminated, published, or sold “[w]ith knowledge or with reckless disregard for the likelihood that the depicted person will suffer harm, or with the intent to harass, intimidate, threaten or coerce the depicted person.”

I still have qualms about extending the “reasonable expectation of privacy” (REP) standard—which is drawn from Fourth Amendment jurisprudence as a bulwark against improper state action—being extended into the realm of private criminal or civil liability.  REP is potentially much broader than the intimate-depiction definitions of revenge porn laws.  And criminalization and civil liability are not the same.  Even though criminal defamation is constitutional when qualified by actual malice, contemporary human rights norms discourage the criminalization of expression at all.

At the same time, I have argued in favor of evolving U.S. law to recognize downstream control of private information, in consonance with both American values in the information age and emerging global legal norms.  Revenge porn laws—as against Adam, to the exclusion of Charlie and Donna—are a modest step in that direction, which European observers will welcome of us.  We will have to remain vigilant to continue to protect freedom of expression in tandem with expanding privacy rights, especially in a time in which the latter at the expense of the former is the fashion.  Conscientious actors such as the Jones panel (Worthen, C.J., and Hoyle and Neeley, JJ.) and Governor Raimondo are doing well, so far.