Opinion ID: 1494306
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: State and Federal Courts: Finding Harassment Statutes Unconstitutionally Vague

Text: Petitioner directs our attention to the Supreme Court of Colorado's determination in People v. Norman, 703 P.2d 1261 (Colo.1985), finding a particular harassment statute to be unconstitutionally vague. The harassment statute in question in Norman stated that harassment is committed `if with intent to harass, annoy, or alarm another person,' such person `engages in conduct or repeatedly commits acts that alarm or seriously annoy another person and that serve no legitimate purpose.' Norman, 703 P.2d at 1266 (emphasis added) (quoting COLO.REV.STAT.  18-9-11(1)(d) (1978)). The Colorado court based its reasoning on one of its earlier opinions, Bolles v. People, 189 Colo. 394, 541 P.2d 80 (1975), which held that the use of the words harass and annoy in subsection (1)(e) in the harassment statute was unconstitutionally broad. [14] Norman, 703 P.2d at 1266 (referring to COLO.REV. STAT.  18-9-11(1)(e), which stated: (1) A person commits harassment if, with intent to harass, annoy, or alarm another person, he ... (e) communicates with a person, anonymously or otherwise by telephone, telegraph mail, or any other form of communication, in a manner likely to harass or cause alarm .... (emphasis added)). The court in Norman found fault with the phraseology of the statute. According to the court, the statute did not define any legislative concern, and the statute covered any and all conduct, by any person. Norman, 703 P.2d at 1267. The court continued: [a]n actor, a clown, a writer or a speaker all might be subject to criminal prosecution because their acts are perceived by some official to annoy or alarm others. Id. The court concluded that the statute was subject to such generality that it exceeds the bounds of flexibility constitutionally available to the legislature, and, more importantly, that subsection (1)(d) contains no limiting standards to assist citizens, courts, judges or police personnel to define what conduct is prohibited and, conversely, what conduct is permitted. Id. (emphasis added). As we shall discuss further, Maryland's statute, though also employing the words annoy and alarm, contains limiting language, and we are further willing to read a limiting reasonable person standard into the statute. Cf. Boychuk, supra, at 788 (contending that either a judicial or legislative formulation of an objective standard by which to judge harassment would save the statutes from constitutional demise). Moreover, Petitioner misapplies the Norman case in arguing for its application to  123. The Colorado Supreme Court later emphasized that the phrases intent to annoy and intent to alarm alone are not unconstitutionally vague, but rather, coupled with restrictive language, other subsections of the same harassment statute withstand constitutional scrutiny. See People v. McBurney, 750 P.2d 916, 919-20 (Colo. 1988) (stating that the previous sections of the predecessor harassment statute, as in Bolles, were not unconstitutional because of the mere presence of the words `annoy' and `alarm,' but because these words were applied to all forms of communication, which obviously contained no particularized standards to limit the scope of the offense (citing Bolles, 541 P.2d at 82-83)). The limiting language found significant in McBurney confined the statute only to harassing or obscene telephone calls. Id. (discussing COLO.REV. STAT.  18-9-111(1)(e) (1986), which includes that a person commits harassment if, with intent to harass, annoy, or alarm another person, he ... [i]nitiates communication with a person, anonymously or otherwise by telephone, in a manner intended to harass or threaten bodily injury or property damage, or makes any comment, request, suggestion, or proposal by telephone which is obscene). Petitioner also relies on Kansas v. Bryan, 259 Kan. 143, 910 P.2d 212 (1996) in which the Supreme Court of Kansas held the Kansas stalking statute to be unconstitutionally vague due to its use of the terms annoy, alarm, and harass and without defining an objective standard. [15] Bryan, 910 P.2d at 217, 219. According to the court's construction, the statute in question employed an objective standard in relation to a course of conduct that alarms, annoys, or harasses a person, but not in relation to the following of a person that achieves the same effect. Id. The Kansas court concluded that, following the reasoning in Coates v. Cincinnati, 402 U.S. 611, 91 S.Ct. 1686, 29 L.Ed.2d 214 (1971), [16] and the lack of an objective standard incorporated in the language of the statute with regard to the act of following a person, frames the statute so that it is unconstitutionally vague; the finder of fact is left without an objective standard by which to examine, and anyone subject to the law is deprived of an objective standard by which to determine, what the crime of stalking constitutes. [17] Bryan, 910 P.2d at 220-21. It appears that the Kansas court did not consider reading into the statute a reasonable person standard. We easily set apart our statute from that of the Kansas statute. The Maryland statute does not employ the word reasonable with some terms, but not others, in the same manner as the Kansas statute [18] and contains further limiting provisions, discussed infra. Petitioner incorrectly relies on the Fifth Circuit case, Kramer v. Price, 712 F.2d 174 (5th Cir.1983), vacated, 723 F.2d 1164 (5th Cir. 1984) (per curiam), [19] which actually bolsters the use of a judicial gloss of a reasonable person standard to rescue a statute from threatened unconstitutionality. Moreover, the Texas harassment statute, which the decision examines, is worded quite differently from Maryland's statute, except that both use the words annoy and alarm. [20] In Kramer, the Fifth Circuit, in a habeas corpus proceeding, affirmed a federal district court's holding that the Texas harassment statute was unconstitutionally vague on its face after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Kramer v. Texas, 605 S.W.2d 861 (Tex.Cr.App.1980) (en banc), affirmed Kramer's conviction under the statute. Kramer, 712 F.2d at 175. Relying on Coates, supra note 16, the Fifth Circuit found the statute unconstitutionally vague because neither the statute nor the court's construction of it provided a standard of conduct or indicated whose sensibilities must be offended. The court stated: The Texas courts have made no attempt to construe the terms `annoy' and `alarm' in a manner which lessens their inherent vagueness. Of greater importance, the Texas courts have refused to construe the statute to indicate whose sensibilities must be offended. [21] Kramer, 712 F.2d at 178 (footnotes omitted) (citing Kramer, 605 S.W.2d 861; Collection Consultants, Inc. v. Texas, 556 S.W.2d 787 (Tex.Cr.App.1977)). The Fifth Circuit identified as a difficulty that the Texas court refused to narrow the statute by, for example, holding that it applies to writings which would annoy the hypothetical reasonable person and that its standard does not vary with the sensitivity of each complainant. Kramer, 712 F.2d at 178 n. 6. The court continued that it could not limit the construction of a statute on appeal when an accused is tried and convicted under a broad construction of the statute. Id. (relying upon Ashton v. Kentucky, 384 U.S. 195, 86 S.Ct. 1407, 16 L.Ed.2d 469 (1966)). In the present case, we narrow the construction of the statute by application of a reasonable person standard to save it from possible unconstitutional vagueness. Petitioner also notes that in Kramer the Fifth Circuit stated that the intent requirementÔÇöintent to annoyÔÇödoes not save the statute from vagueness because the conduct which must be motivated by intent, as well as the standard by which that conduct is to be assessed, remain vague. Kramer, 712 F.2d at 178. We agree that a specific intent requirement alone does not save a statute, but we have declared that it is helpful in reliev[ing] the statute of the objection that it punishes without warning an offense of which the accused was unaware. Williams, 329 Md. at 9, 616 A.2d at 1279 (internal quotation marks omitted) (alterations in original) (quoting Screws v. United States, 325 U.S. 91, 101-02, 65 S.Ct. 1031, 1035, 89 L.Ed. 1495 (1945) (plurality opinion)). In addition, as discussed infra, neither the conduct motivated by the intent nor the standard applied to Maryland's statute remains constitutionally vague after applying a narrower construction as we have. Petitioner also relies on Oregon v. Sanderson, 33 Or.App. 173, 575 P.2d 1025 (1978), overruled in part, Oregon v. Schwartz, 173 Or.App. 301, 21 P.3d 1128, 1134 (2001), in which the Court of Appeals of Oregon declared that state's harassment statute unconstitutionally vague. The statute provided that [a] person commits the crime of harassment if, with intent to harass, annoy or alarm another person, he ... [e]ngages in a course of conduct that alarms or seriously annoys another person and which serves no legitimate purpose. Sanderson, 575 P.2d at 1026 (quoting OR.REV.STAT.  166.065(1)(d)). The Oregon court had particular difficulty with the phrase alarms or seriously annoys because it gives no basis to distinguish between anti-social conduct which was intended to be prohibited and socially tolerable conduct which could not reasonably have been intended to be subject to criminal sanction. [22] Sanderson, 575 P.2d at 1027. The Sanderson court refused to apply a limiting construction because it decided that such a limiting judicial construction is only possible if the underlying purpose of the statute is apparent from the statute's prior judicial interpretation or legislative history, id., and that, in this instance, the statute was enacted too recently to have acquired a judicial gloss and that the legislative history indicates an intention to create a catchall offense. Sanderson, 575 P.2d at 1028. We reach the opposite conclusion with regard to  123 because, although its legislative history does not dictate how the phraseology came about, that history does provide insight into the legislative purpose, whereas the Oregon court determined that its statute's legislative history intended to enact a catchall provisionÔÇöa dragnet provision ... to reach myriad forms of harassment that cannot be specifically enumerated. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted) (alteration in original) (citation omitted). Furthermore, the Court of Appeals of Oregon in Oregon v. Schwartz, 173 Or. App. 301, 21 P.3d 1128, 1134 (Ct.App.2001), expressly repudiated the quote in Sanderson that the fundamental flaw of the statute at issue is that it gave no basis to distinguish between anti-social conduct which was intended to be prohibited and socially tolerable conduct which could not reasonably have been intended to be subject to criminal action. Schwartz, 21 P.3d at 1134 (internal quotation marks omitted) (quoting Sanderson, 575 P.2d at 1027). The court reasoned in Schwartz: [A]n argument that a statute covers too much ground can never, standing alone, support a vagueness challenge. As a matter of logic, the conclusion that a law is insufficiently definite to provide guidance to its potential violators and enforcers simply does not follow from the premise that the statute criminalizes too broad a category of conduct. Secondly, such an argument cannot provide the bases for an overbreadth claim, because [a] legislature can make a law as `broad' and inclusive as it chooses unless it reaches into constitutionally protected ground. ... The sole limit on a statute's breadth is constitutionality, not our second-guessing of what the legislature could or could not have deemed socially tolerable. Schwartz, 21 P.3d at 1134 (second alteration in original) (citation omitted).