Opinion ID: 2186268
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Are sections 181.75 and 181.76 unconstitutionally vague ?

Text: It is a basic principle of due process that an enactment is void for vagueness if its prohibitions are not clearly defined. Grayned v. City of Rockford, 408 U.S. 104, 108, 92 S.Ct. 2294, 2298, 33 L.Ed.2d 222 (1972). In order to provide fair warning, we insist that laws give the person of ordinary intelligence a reasonable opportunity to know what is prohibited, so that he or she may act accordingly. Id. Defendants assert that section 181.75 is vague because it prohibits soliciting indirectly. They claim [t]he chilling effect of `indirectly' could reasonably deter all speech concerning polygraphs. Both sections 181.75 and 181.76 contain the phrase any test purporting to test honesty, making the statutes unconstitutionally vague, defendants claim, because it may chill employers from asking perfectly legitimate questions about an employee's honesty. We do not agree that indirect solicitation is so vague that persons of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning. Connally v. General Construction Co., 269 U.S. 385, 391, 46 S.Ct. 126, 127, 70 L.Ed. 322 (1926). It should be apparent that indirect means not direct; and neither of the adverbs directly or indirectly alters the meaning of the words solicit or require or lessens in any way the requirement that the employer be found to have solicited or required the employee or applicant to take a polygraph, voice stress analysis, or similar test. The phrase directly or indirectly in section 181.75 actually serves to warn employers that the prohibition extends to solicitation which may be subtle. A statute will not be declared void for vagueness and uncertainty where the meaning thereof may be implied, or where it employs words in common use, or words commonly understood    or [having] an unmistakable significance in the connection in which they are employed. Invention Marketing Inc. v. Spannaus, 279 N.W.2d 74, 80 (Minn.1979) (quoting Wichelman v. Missner, 250 Minn. 88, 111, 83 N.W.2d 800, 819 (1957)). Section 181.75 will not be declared unconstitutionally vague merely because situations can be imagined in which it will be difficult to prove that what occurred was solicitation. On the other hand, we feel that the phrase any test purporting to test honesty would render both sections 181.75 and 181.76 unconstitutionally vague in the absence of an authoritive construction. The two techniques enumerated in section 181.75, the polygraph and the voice stress analysis, both purport to measure physiological changes. [16] Accordingly, we construe any test purporting to test honesty to be limited to those tests and procedures which similarly purport to measure physiological changes in the subject tested. Thus, we exclude from the current prohibitions of section 181.75 written psychological questionnaires, personal judgments made by an employer or his or her agent, even if based in part on observations of physical behavior or demeanor, and all other gauges of honesty which do not purport to measure physiological changes. With this construction, neither section 181.75 nor section 181.76 is unconstitutionally vague.