Opinion ID: 2078371
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The Constitutionality of New York's Anti-Stalking Law

Text: With these principles in mind, we begin by addressing whether Penal Law § 120.45 is unconstitutionally vague as applied to defendant. [11] The statute contains a preamble followed by three subdivisions. [12] The preamble provides that a person is guilty of stalking in the fourth degree if he or she (1) intentionally and for no legitimate purpose (2) engages in a course of conduct directed at a specific person (3) when he knows or reasonably should know that his conduct will have either of two consequences: first, that it is likely to cause reasonable fear of material harm to the victim's (or other specified third party's) physical health, safety or property ( see subd [1]); or second, that the conduct causes material harm to the victim's mental or emotional health and consists of following, telephoning or initiating communication with the victim (or other specified third party) after being clearly told to stop ( see subd [2]). Defendant's principal attack is on the words no legitimate purpose. He argues that the Legislature's failure to define the term renders the statute unconstitutionally vague. He contends that an ordinary person would not know what the phrase means, and that this uncertainty will result in arbitrary enforcement. Defendant asserts that the vagueness problem is exacerbated because the law does not contain a specific intent requirement. We note at the outset that the statute does contain a mens rea requirement of intent, in that a person cannot be guilty of stalking by accident, inadvertence or chance encounter. To be convicted, the person must have intended to engage in a course of conduct targeted at a specific individual. Defendant argues that this intent requirement is not enough; he claims that the statute must contain a requirement that the offender intend a specific result, such as fear or harm. We disagree. In People v Nelson (69 NY2d 302 [1987]), this Court upheld a jostling statute as against a vagueness challenge even though the statute did not specifically require larcenous intent. Like the statute before us today, it prohibited a certain intentional course of conduct regardless of the wrongdoer's underlying purpose or motive  ( id. at 307-308 [emphasis added]). We observed that the jostling statute clearly delineates specific conduct easily avoided by the innocent-minded and thus should present no difficulty for a citizen to comprehend that he must refrain from acting with the intent to bring his hand into the proximity of a stranger's pocket or handbag unnecessarily ( id. at 307). Similarly, defendant could not reasonably have failed to realize that his intentional course of conduct directed at the complainant for over a month was unlawful under the anti-stalking statute. The Legislature's decision to require intent as to a particular course of conductas opposed to a specific resultwas purposeful. In following the lead taken by the drafters of the Model Anti-Stalking Code, [13] the Legislature enacted Penal Law § 120.45 recognizing that many stalkers are mentally or emotionally disturbed and that trying to discern their specific motivations would prove difficult, if not impossible. The statute thus focuses on what the offenders do, not what they mean by it or what they intend as their ultimate goal. In this manner, the law could properly reach those delusional stalkers who believe either that their victims are in love with them or that they can win their victims' love by pursuing them (Note, Anti-Stalking Laws: Do They Adequately Protect Stalking Victims?, 21 Harv Women's LJ 229, 254 [1998]). If the Legislature had required that the stalker intend to frighten or harm the victim, the statute would be debilitated and a great many victims endangered. Stalkers would be free to continue as long as they harbored the notion that they stood to win, rather than harm, their prey. We cannot tell how many stalkers intend no harm. The Legislature did not want to give them license. In considering defendant's conduct, we cannot conclude that the phrases course of conduct or directed at a specific person are in any way vague. From February 14 to April 8 he unflaggingly trailed complainant, from the sidewalk where he first presented her with a bouquet of flowers, to the subway car 30 city blocks away where he simply smirked at her. This deliberate and intentional conduct, repeated day after day, was aimed at one victim. Thus, defendant cannot reasonably contend that this was not a willful course of conduct directed at a specific person or that this description is in any way vague as to him. The anti-stalking statute also requires that the offender know or reasonably should know that his conduct is likely to cause reasonable fear of material harm to the victim's physical health, safety or property ( see Penal Law § 120.45 [1]). And, in the case of subdivision (2), the statute specifies that the offender must follow, telephone or initiate communication with the victim after being told to stop. These provisions are important because they eliminate the concern that a particular course of conduct will be deemed criminal based merely on the subjective fear or sensibilities of the alleged victim. The fear must be reasonable and not idiosyncratic; the harm (or likely harm) must be material. These are objective terms easily understood. Like the jostling statute in Nelson, the anti-stalking law is easily followed by most citizens of this State, provides objective criteria    [and] is not dependent upon the subjective conclusions of a complainant or an arresting officer (69 NY2d at 308). In turning to the words no legitimate purpose, we note that People v Shack (86 NY2d 529 [1995]) involved a constitutional attack on an almost identical phrase. There, the defendant challenged Penal Law § 240.30 (2), which provides that [a] person is guilty of aggravated harassment in the second degree when, with intent to harass, annoy, threaten or alarm another person, he    [m]akes a telephone call, whether or not a conversation ensues, with no purpose of legitimate communication ( Shack, 86 NY2d at 533 [emphasis added]). As defendant does here, Shack argued that the subjective term `legitimate'    is incapable of precise definition ( id. at 538). We rejected his claim, holding that common understanding and practices clarified the meaning of the phrase as being the absence of expression of ideas or thoughts other than threats and/or intimidating or coercive utterances ( id. ). We noted that the words no purpose of legitimate communication should not be considered in isolation. They are but one element of a statute that fully defines the prohibited act ( id. at 539). Considered in light of the clear and understandable elements of the criminal conduct ( id. ), we concluded that the statute gave Shack adequate notice and law enforcement authorities sufficient guidance. Here, too, we are satisfied that an ordinary understanding of the phrase no legitimate purpose means the absence of a reason or justification to engage someone, other than to hound, frighten, intimidate or threaten. The common understanding of that phrase and the various other provisions of the anti-stalking statute, when read as a whole, furnished defendant with adequate notice that his unrelenting pursuit of complainant was unlawful, particularly after she told him that she wanted no contact with him. Besides the no legitimate purpose element, the statute contains lucid provisos clearly applicable to defendant's conduct: The course of conduct must be intentional; it must be aimed at a specific person; and the offender must know (or have reason to know) that his conduct will (or likely will) instill reasonable fear of material harm in the victim. In the case of subdivision (2), the offender must have been told to cease his conduct after having followed, telephoned or initiated communication with the victim. Defendant has offered no explanation for having inflicted himself on complainant, nor has he attempted to show that his intrusive behavior involved some valid purpose other than hounding her to the point of harm. This is not legitimate, and defendant has given us no reason to conclude that it could have been anything but illegitimate. Lastly, he has not argued to this Court that complainant was never in fear, reasonable or otherwise, or that she suffered no harm, whether it be material or not. We therefore conclude that sections 120.45 (1) and (2) of the Penal Law, as applied to defendant's conduct, are not unconstitutionally vague. It follows that, because there exists at least one constitutional application of the statute, it is not invalid on its face ( see Hoffman Estates, 455 US at 499, 505). Accordingly, the order of the Appellate Term should be affirmed. Chief Judge KAYE (concurring in result). I join in the Court's rejection of defendant's as-applied vagueness challenge. Additionally, I agree with the Court's rejection of defendant's facial challenge because the language of the statute provides persons of ordinary intelligence with fair notice of what is proscribed and does not permit arbitrary or discriminatory enforcement by the police. That is all that is required to resolve this case, in accordance with a long line of precedents of this Court and others throughout the state that have for decades entertained as-applied and facial challenges to statutes. What I cannot accept is the rule now imposed thatin a vagueness challengea statute must be found constitutional on its face whenever an as-applied challenge fails. The Court's last sentence says it all: because there exists at least one constitutional application of the statute, it is not invalid on its face (majority op at 429). Thus, either a statute will be found constitutional as applied and a facial challenge thereby fails on the merits (as here), or a statute will be found unconstitutional as applied and the Courthaving resolved the controversy before itdoes not need to reach the facial challenge. The Court's rule is taken from United States v Salerno (481 US 739, 745 [1987]), which opined that, in order to prevail on most facial claims, the challenger must establish that no set of circumstances exists under which the Act would be valid. This, however, has not previously been our rule for vagueness challenges to criminal statutes, [1] nor should it be. Indeed, it is not even the Supreme Court's rule. [2] A statute is unconstitutionally vague when either of two separate circumstances exist: (1) the statute fails to provide sufficient notice, such that a person of ordinary intelligence could not reasonably understand [what conduct is lawful and what is] proscribed, or (2) the statute is written in a manner that permits or encourages arbitrary or discriminatory enforcement ( People v Bright, 71 NY2d 376, 382 [1988]). The first prong thus presumes that the statute by its terms may cover both innocent and criminal conduct, without fair notice of which conduct is meant to be prohibited. In other words, a vague statute may well cover situations properly criminalized, and would thus be constitutional as applied to those situations. Such a statutealthough not unconstitutional in all its applicationscould nevertheless be vague on its face insofar as its language covered not only such conduct, but also a substantial amount of innocent conduct ( see Papachristou v City of Jacksonville, 405 US 156, 163 [1972] [vagrancy statute unconstitutionally vague because it makes criminal activities which by modern standards are normally innocent]; cf. Fargo Women's Health Org. v Schafer, 507 US 1013, 1014 [1993] [O'Connor, J., joined by Souter, J., concurring] [facial challenge to abortion waiting-period statute may prevail if law is unconstitutional in a large fraction of    cases]). In Bright, after striking down the statute on its face, we then went on to determine that even if it had not been vague on its face, the statute would still have been vague as applied insofar as transportation facility was defined in such a broad, all-encompassing manner so as to include some facilities that are more analogous to the public street than to a specific area of restricted public access that gives notice of its prohibition against loitering (71 NY2d at 386). Because the two facilities involved in Bright the Long Island Railroad Station and the Port Authority Bus Terminalwere each more like a small, indoor city than merely a station that offered few amenities and served primarily as a place to purchase a ticket and wait for a train or a bus, we held the statute unconstitutional as applied ( id. at 387, 386). By implication, had the transportation facility in question been a small-town station instead of a multipurpose New York City complex, the statute would not have been vague as applied. And had a defendant from that small town challenged the statute only as applied, that defendant would have lost. But we nevertheless held the statute unconstitutional on its face, although it was not unconstitutional in every conceivable application. Similarly, in Coates v City of Cincinnati (402 US 611, 612 [1971]), the Supreme Court struck down as vague on its face an ordinance prohibiting persons assembled on a sidewalk from conduct[ing] themselves in a manner annoying to persons passing by. The Court explained that [i]t is said that the ordinance is broad enough to encompass many types of conduct clearly within the city's constitutional power to prohibit. And so, indeed, it is. The city is free to prevent people from    engaging in countless    forms of antisocial conduct. It can do so through the enactment and enforcement of ordinances directed with reasonable specificity toward the conduct to be prohibited.    It cannot constitutionally do so through the enactment and enforcement of an ordinance whose violation may entirely depend upon whether or not a policeman is annoyed (402 US at 614 [citation omitted]). Again, a defendant whose conduct was clearly within the city's constitutional power to prohibit and who challenged the statute only as applied would have lost but yet the statute would still have been unconstitutional on its face. This makes sense because vagueness is different. Insofar as a statute's language may be read to cover both criminal and innocent conductand thus may in some circumstances be constitutional as applied and in others unconstitutionalit may fail to provide fair notice as to just what conduct is in fact meant to be prohibited, rendering it unconstitutional on its face. It is only in this sensethat no one can define the limits of the situations that a statute is meant to proscribe, even though some may know with certainty that their conduct is included within the vast universe of what is prohibitedthat it may be said that a facially vague statute is vague in all its conceivable applications. In other words, a facially vague statute fails to give anyone notice of its limits, even though everyone might understand its core, and even though it may not be unconstitutional as applied to this core. A vague statute grants the police too much discretion in every case, regardless of whether that discretion is applied wisely or poorly in a particular case   . And if every application of the ordinance represents an exercise of unlimited discretion, then the ordinance is invalid in all its applications ( Morales, 527 US at 71 [Breyer, J., concurring] [emphasis in original]). Indeed, the Supreme Court has declared that the more important aspect of vagueness doctrine `is    the requirement that a legislature establish minimal guidelines to govern law enforcement' ( Kolender, 461 US at 358 [citation omitted]). Insofar as the Court now concludes that defendants may not mount a facial challenge when they should have known that their conduct was meant to be proscribed by the challenged statute, its analysis mistakenly focuses exclusively on the first prong of the vagueness test while ignoring the second. Indeed, a focus on the second, more important ( Kolender, 461 US at 358), prong makes clear why the Court's rule is hard to sustain. Were vagueness to be defined merely in terms of whether a statute provides fair notice of what is prohibited, it would be easy to conceive of the failure of an as-applied challenge when the conduct of the particular defendant fit squarely within the `hard core' of the statute's proscriptions ( Broadrick v Oklahoma, 413 US 601, 608 [1973]). But the second prong mandates that a statute not permit or encourage arbitrary or discriminatory enforcement by the police. The test is not whether an officer actually exercised discretion arbitrarily in a given case. Thus understood, an analysis of the second prong as applied to a defendant has no discernible meaning; the very nature of a second-prong analysis is inherently a facial one. Indeed, the Court's so-called as-applied analysisfocusing as it does on the language of the statute as commonly understood; properly construing no legitimate purpose to mean the absence of a reason or justification to engage someone, other than to hound, frighten, intimidate or threaten (majority op at 428); and concluding that the statute is not in any way vague (majority op at 427)seems to me to be in truth a facial analysis. Finally, the Court asserts that, under its rule, facial challenges may nevertheless succeedas in Bright when a statute is so vague that it fail[s] to specify any standard of conduct    and place[s] `complete discretion in the hands of the police' (majority op at 423 [citation omitted]). A statute is vague when a person of ordinary intelligence cannot reasonably understand what conduct is proscribed or when it is written in a manner that permits or encourages arbitrary or discriminatory enforcement. To begin to distinguish among gradations of vagueness so as to determine not merely that a statute fails this constitutional test but rather that it is so vague as to be facially invalid creates an unworkable standard. Thus, in the end the Court's rule is that failure of an as-applied challenge to the constitutionality of a statute on vagueness grounds automatically constitutes failure of a facial challenge as wellunless the Court decides to reach the merits of a facial challenge by already having determined that the challenger should prevail. Order affirmed.