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New York Court Strikes Down Cyberbullying Law
[ONLINE.WSJ] New York's top court struck down a law that made cyberbullying a crime, in what had been viewed as a test case of recent state and local statutes that target online speech.The New York Court of Appeals, in a 5-2 ruling, held on Tuesday that the 2010 Albany County law prohibited a vast swath of speech "far beyond the cyberbullying of children," in violation of the First Amendment. The court's ruling could stand as a guidepost for other state high courts hearing challenges to such laws, as well as for states and localities considering criminal penalties for cyberbullying, legal experts said. Besides Albany, four other New York counties and more than a dozen states, including Louisiana and North Carolina, have similar laws. The Albany law made it a crime to electronically communicate "private, personal, false, or sexual information," intended to "harass, annoy, threaten, abuse, taunt, intimidate, torment, humiliate, or otherwise inflict significant emotional harm on another person" for no legitimate purpose. Cohoes High School student Marquan W. Mackey-Meggs was the first to be charged under the law, after the then-15-year-old created a Facebook page in 2010 called "Cohoes Flame" and posted photos of other teenagers with captions that included graphic and sexual comments, according to court documents. He pleaded guilty, on the condition that he could challenge the constitutionality of the law. Judge Victoria Graffeo, writing for the majority, described the posts as "repulsive and harmful" but declined the county's request to uphold the law in a form that would have barred narrow categories of electronic communications, including sexually explicit photographs and private or personal sexual information, sent with the intent to harm. Posted by: Fred 2014-07-03 |
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