By Andrew Staub | PA Independent
A federal judge has quelled state lawmakers’ attempts to silence criminals, saying First Amendment rights don’t end where prison walls begin.
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U.S. Middle District Chief Judge Christopher Conner last Tuesday struck down the Revictimization Relief Act, a law the General Assembly hastily passed last year largely in response to students from a progressive college choosing a convicted cop-killer as their commencement speaker.
“A past criminal offense does not extinguish the offender’s constitutional right to free expression,” the judge wrote. “The First Amendment does not evanesce at the prison gate, and its enduring guarantee of freedom of speech subsumes the right to expressive conduct that some may find offensive.”
The law gave crime victims and prosecutors the power to silence offenders by seeking a civil injunction to stop speech that could cause mental anguish. In other words, convicts could be shut up before they even said a word.
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Despite the ruling, state Rep. Mike Vereb, the Montgomery County Republican who sponsored the law, didn’t back down. He said the judge’s decision only energized supporters of the Revictimization Relief Act.
“We believe today, yesterday and tomorrow that the law was constitutional,” he said.
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Conner, though, called the act “the embodiment of a content-based regulation of speech” and found it to be vague and overbroad. It did not even define the term offender, leaving open the possibility people accused but not yet convicted of a crime could have their free-speech rights stifled, the judge noted in the ruling that found the law also violated the Fifth Amendment right to due process.
It wasn’t lost upon Conner, either, that lawmakers often invoked convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal when extolling the legislation.
Vereb proposed the bill Oct. 2, just days before Abu-Jamal was scheduled to deliver a recorded graduation speech to students at Goddard College in Vermont.
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Though Abu-Jamal’s speech ultimately did not even reference the shooting, Vereb argued that he was continuing to traumatize Faulkner’s widow.
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Vereb said he spoke with Attorney General Kathleen Kane on Wednesday, and she was still mulling whether to appeal Conner’s ruling.
“Attorney General Kane and her legal team are still reviewing the opinion that was handed down late yesterday and, at this time, all possibilities are being evaluated,” Jeffrey A. Johnson, a Kane spokesman, said Thursday.
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Absent an appeal, Vereb said lawmakers would try to amend the law. Though nobody had tried to use it before Conner struck it down, Vereb said some victims have still been tormented by offenders.
“That’s why we will not let any grass grow under our feet in terms of what we’re going to do,” he said. “There’s going to be a swift response to this.”
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Though short-lived, the law did have a chilling effect on prisoners’ speech, Conner wrote. Free Speech Radio News stopped widely publishing Abu-Jamal’s commentaries, while another prisoner shelved the publication of a memoir about serving life in prison, the judge noted.
Abu-Jamal and other prisoners sued. So did the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which referred to the law as the “Silencing Act.”
The ACLU complaint included journalists, news outlets and advocacy organizations among its 11 plaintiffs. Four individuals convicted of various crimes, including first-degree and third-degree murder, but now run programs to help offender re-enter communities and to keep youth out of prison, were also party to the lawsuit and argued the law could penalize that speech, according to the complaint.
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The ACLU argued that the law so vague and overbroad. Conner agreed, and found that it was, ultimately, unconstitutional.
“However well-intentioned its legislative efforts,” Conner wrote, “the General Assembly fell woefully short of the mark.”
