R. A. V. v. City of St. Paul
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R. A. V., Petitioner, v. City of St. Paul, Minnesota, 505 U.S. 377 (1992) was an important United States Supreme Court case involving the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and freedom of speech.
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Background
The United States Supreme Court has, over its history, but particularly during the twentieth century, dealt with many cases involving the First Amendment and freedom of speech, particularly symbolic speech. In cases such as Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925), Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568 (1942), New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973) and others, the Supreme Court has had to adjudicate issues relating to freedom of speech; in more recent years, the Court has tended to rule in favor of the speech that came into question.
The Case
The case was argued in the U.S. Supreme Court on December 4, 1991.
From the decision of the court, 505 U.S. 377:
- "In the predawn hours of June 21, 1990, petitioner and several other teenagers allegedly assembled a crudely made cross by taping together broken chair legs. They then allegedly burned the cross inside the fenced yard of a black family that lived across the street from the house where petitioner was staying."
- See cross burning.
- "[The] petitioner R.A.V. was charged under, inter alia, the St. Paul, Minnesota, Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance, which prohibits the display of a symbol which one knows or has reason to know 'arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender.'"
- "Whoever places on public or private property a symbol, object, appellation, characterization or graffiti, including, but not limited to, a burning cross or Nazi swastika, which one knows or has reasonable grounds to know arouses anger, alarm, or resentment in others, on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender commits disorderly conduct and shall be guilty of a misdemeanor." St. Paul Bias Motivated Crime Ordinance, Section 292.02 Minn. Legis. code (1990).
From the defense:
- "We ask the court to reflect on the 'content' of the 'expressive conduct' represented by a 'burning cross.' It is no less than the first step in an act of racial violence. It was and unfortunately still is the equivalent of [the] waving of a knife before the thrust, the pointing of a gun before it is fired, the lighting of the match before the reason, the hanging of the noose before the lynching. It is not a political statement, or even a cowardly statement of hatred. It is the first step in an act of assault. It can be no more protected than holding a gun to a victim['s] head. It is perhaps the ultimate expression of 'fighting words.'" App. to Brief for Petitioner.
The Decision
Trial Court
The trial court rejected the charge against the petitioner on the grounds that the statute in question was overly broad and "impermissibly content-based."
State Supreme Court
The State Supreme Court overturned the trial courts decision, finding cross burning to be fighting words (Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire) and the law to be reasonable given "compelling government interest in protecting the community against bias-motivated threats to public safety and order." In Re Welfare of R.A.V., 464 N.W.2 507, 510 (Minn. 1991).
Supreme Court
On June 22, 1992, the Supreme Court overturned the state supreme court's decision, declaring the City's ordinance unconstitutional. They found cross burning to be not fighting words but a "viewpoint" in the "free market of ideas" protected by the first amendment.
As Justice Antonin Scalia asserted in the opinion of the Court,
- Assuming, arguendo, that all of the expression reached by the ordinance is proscribable under the "fighting words" doctrine, we nonetheless conclude that the ordinance is facially unconstitutional in that it prohibits otherwise permitted speech solely on the basis of the subjects the speech addresses. [505 U.S. 377]
According to Judith Butler,
- "The majority on the High Court (Scalia, Rehnquist, Kennedy, Souter, Thomas) then offered a second reason for declaring the ordinance unconstitutional, a judicially activist contribution which took many jurists by surprise: the justices severely restricted the possible doctrinal scope of 'fighting words' by claiming it unconstitutional to impose prohibitions on speech solely on the basis of the 'content' or 'subjects addressed' in that speech. In order to determine whether words are fighting words, there can be no decisive recourse to the content and the subject matter of what is said."
Again, Scalia:
- "Let there be no mistake about our belief that burning a cross in someone's front yard is reprehensible. But, St. Paul has sufficient means at its disposal to prevent such behavior without adding the first Amendment to the fire."
According to Mari Matsuda and Charles Lawrence:
- "The cross burners are portrayed as an unpopular minority that the Supreme Court must defend against the power of the state. The injury to the Jones family is appropriated and the cross burner is cast as the injured victim. The reality of ongoing racism and exclusion is erased and bigotry is redefined as majoritarian condemnation of racist views."
Again Butler:
- "The burning of the cross which is, after all, on the black family's lawn, is thus made strictly analogous--and morally equivalent--to an individual speaking in public on whether or not there ought to be a fifty-cent tax on gasoline...the historical correlation between cross-burning and marking a community, a family, or an individual for further violence is also ignored.....The relation between cross-burnings and torchings of both persons and properties is historically established. Hence, from this perspective, the burning cross assumes the status of a direct address and a threat and, as such, is construed either as the incipient moment of injurious action or as the statement of an intention to injure....The question of whether or not the black family in Minnesota is entitled to protection from public displays such as cross-burnings is displaced onto the question of whether or not the 'content' of free speech is to be protected from those who would burn it."
Justice Stevens, who disagrees with Scalia on the second reason:
- "Lighting a fire near an ammunition dump or a gasoline storage tank is especially dangerous; such behaviour may be punished more severely than burning trash in a vacant lot. Threatening someone because of her race or religious beliefs may cause particularly sever trauma or touch off a riot, and threatening a high public official may cause substantial social disruptions; such threats may be punished more severely than threats against someone based on, say, his support of a particular athletic team."
Sources
- Butler, Judith (1997). Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415915880.
- Lawrence III, Charles R. and Matsuda, Mari J. eds. (1993). Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment. Westview Press. ISBN 0813384281.