Opinion ID: 2091872
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Abuse of the Right

Text: The right to speak is qualified, of course, by § 9's responsibility clause, which provides that for the abuse of that right, every person shall be responsible. Ind. Const. art. 1, § 9. The responsibility clause expressly recognizes the state's prerogative to punish expressive activity that constitutes an abuse of the right to speak. In Price, we defined abuse in light of the political philosophy that informs the Indiana Constitution. 622 N.E.2d at 958-59; see Patrick Baude, Has The Indiana Constitution Found Its Epic?, 69 Ind.L.J. 849 (1994). Under that philosophy, individuals possess inalienable freedom to do as they will, but they have collectively delegated to government a quantum of that freedom in order to advance everyone's peace, safety, and well-being. Ind. Const. art. 1, § 1; see In re Lawrance, 579 N.E.2d 32, 39 n. 3 (Ind.1991). The purpose of state power, then, is to foster an atmosphere in which individuals can fully enjoy that measure of freedom they have not delegated to government. Applying this philosophy in Price, we construed abuse as any expressive activity that injures the retained rights of individuals or undermines the State's efforts to facilitate their enjoyment. 622 N.E.2d at 959; see also State v. Marshall, 859 S.W.2d 289, 293-94 (Tenn.1993) (quoting 4 William Blackstone, Commentaries  151-52; in defining abuse under Tennessee's parallel provision as any expression that legislature could reasonably find destructive of the ends of society). In other words, expressive activity constitutes abuse if, notwithstanding § 9, it is punishable within the strictures of the police power, as that power is generally delineated in the personal liberty clause, Ind. Const. art. 1, § 1. [6] In Price, we made clear that in reviewing the state's determination that expression is an abuse, we will typically require only that [the conclusion] be rational. 622 N.E.2d at 959. It is true that the propriety of an exercise of the police power is a judicial question. State v. Gerhardt, 145 Ind. 439, 451, 44 N.E. 469 (1896). Nevertheless, we must accord considerable deference to the judgment of the legislature, inasmuch as the decision as to what constitutes a public purpose is first and foremost a legislative one. Cf. Collins v. Day, 644 N.E.2d 72, 80 (Ind.1994). We have limited ourselves to the narrow role of determining whether challenged state action has some reasonable relation to [7] or tendency to promote [8] the state's legitimate interests. Thus, if a claimant demonstrates that the right to speak clause is implicated, he or she retains the burden of proving that the State could not reasonably conclude that the restricted expression was an abuse.