Court Opinion

ID: 8984817
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-11-27 11:40:22.897779+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:10:45.573571
License: Public Domain

JON 0. NEWMAN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
There are times when well-intentioned legislators, acting for the best of reasons, enact a statute that violates the Constitution. When that occurs, courts are challenged to resist the passions of the moment that swayed the legislators and to apply the paramount restrictions of the Constitution. This case presents such a challenge.
The New York legislature, responding to the public outrage over the 1977 “Son of Sam” murders and to the prospect that the killer, when apprehended, might write a book about his crimes, enacted a statute intended to prevent criminals from profiting from their crimes. See N.Y.Exec.Law § 632-a (McKinney 1982 & Supp.1990). That laudable purpose, which New York is free to carry out in a variety of ways, including comprehensive victim restitution provisions, resulted in a statute that violates the First Amendment. Because the Court upholds the statute, thereby impairing First Amendment protections and depriving the public of valuable writings about activities of high public interest, I respectfully dissent.
All members of the panel are in agreement that section 632-a imposes such a direct burden on free expression that its constitutionality is to be tested under standards of “strict scrutiny.” See Meyer v. Grant, 486 U.S. 414, 108 S.Ct. 1886, 100 L.Ed.2d 425 (1988). We also agree that among the components of the strict scrutiny standard in the area of free expression are requirements that the challenged statute is narrowly tailored to advance important governmental interests and that any distinction made by the statute concerning speech in general or speech of particular content must be “necessary to serve a compelling state interest” and “narrowly *785drawn to achieve that end.” See Arkansas Writers’ Project, Inc. v. Ragland, 481 U.S. 221, 231, 107 S.Ct. 1722, 1728, 95 L.Ed.2d 209 (1987). We disagree on whether section 632-a meets these exacting tests.
The application of the statute only to speech, and, more significantly, only to speech of specified content, is beyond dispute. The statute does not require that all payments to criminals be escrowed for the benefit of crime victims; it applies only to payments made to those who write books or use other forms of communication. And, rather than apply to all payments to criminals who write books, it applies only to those payments made to criminals who write books in which they express “thoughts, feelings, opinions, or emotions” regarding their crimes. N.Y.Exec.Law § 632-a(1). The opportunity to sell books on a variety of other topics, enhanced for many criminals by the fame resulting from their crimes, is not disturbed by this statute. Thus, John Ehrlichman can write novels with no concern that his royalties, doubtless augmented by the fame attending his Watergate crimes, will be held for five years to pay claims of victims or other creditors. The content-based application of the statute is vividly illustrated by the decision of the New York Crime Victims Compensation Board, which administers the statute, to apply it to Jean Harris’s autobiography, Stranger in Two Worlds, because two chapters, containing primarily testimony from her trial, referred to her crime. See Children of Bedford, Inc. v. Petromelis, 143 Misc.2d 999, 541 N.Y.S.2d 894 (Sup.Ct.N.Y.Cty.1989), aff'd, App.Div., 556 N.Y.S.2d 483 (1st Dep’t 1990). Had the book concerned exclusively conditions at Bedford Hills prison, Harris’s royalties, though enhanced by the notoriety of her crime, would not have been escrowed for the family of her victim.
The Court responds to the content-based discrimination of section 632-a in two ways, neither of which, in my view, is valid. First, the Court applies a legal analysis that defines the state interest being advanced in terms of the statute’s scope, thereby reaching the circular result that the scope of the statute is precisely tailored to the state’s objective. But the question in all such cases is whether a state, consistent with the First Amendment, can pursue its objective by focusing on speech of particular content. New York is entitled to escrow for the benefit of crime victims all payments to criminals. The question is whether it can escrow only payments to criminals who write books and, even if that is so, whether it can escrow only payments to criminals who write books about their crimes. To say that New York can do so because escrowing this narrow category of payments benefits crime victims, an objective New York is anxious to achieve, eliminates the entire inquiry concerning the validity of content-based discriminations. Every content-based discrimination could be 'upheld by simply observing that the state is anxious to regulate the designated category of speech. It could have been said as easily in Arkansas Writers that the tax was valid because it achieved the state’s objective of raising revenue from the category of publications within the statute’s coverage. The Supreme Court, however, was not so easily satisfied, and the Arkansas tax statute that discriminated among types of publications was held to violate the First Amendment.
Next, the Court upholds the content-based discrimination on the factual ground that “as a practical matter, the sole asset of most criminals is the right to tell the story of their crimes.” 916 F.2d at 783. In the first place, I doubt that this assertion is true, and I am confident that it has not been established either in the record of this case or, if it is a legislative fact, in the proceedings of the New York legislature, which held no hearings on the “Son of Sam” law. Of all criminals who might be liable for restitution, many have assets independent of the proceeds of their crimes. Crime is not exclusively an activity of the poor. And many poor criminals whose crimes involve the taking of property have at least some of that property available for restitution when they are arrested. Thus, I think it unlikely that the opportunity to write about their crimes is the sole or even principal asset of most criminals. My *786guess is that very few criminals have a crime story worth selling and that their number is far less than the sum of criminals with assets independent of their crime proceeds plus impoverished criminals in possession of such proceeds when arrested.
Second, and more fundamentally, even if it were true that the sole asset of most criminals is the right to tell the story of their crime, that observation would not validate New York’s content-based regulation of speech. A state cannot select speech of a particular content for regulation just because such speech is a major part of an area of relevant activity that the state has elected not to regulate in full. The tax on a particular category of publications invalidated in Arkansas Writers would not have been saved from invalidation under the First Amendment even if the taxable revenues of the covered publications had accounted for most of the taxable revenues of all publications.
Recognizing that a content-based discrimination cannot be upheld if a legitimate state objective can be achieved by reasonably available alternative means, the Court rejects the possibility of using New York’s attachment laws to secure for crime victims all profits realized by criminals, including book profits. This rejection rests on the view that New York’s attachment remedies are currently too limited to be used by many crime victims. If that is so, the answer required by the First Amendment is to broaden the remedies, not to select books about crime for special regulation.
To whatever extent the majority relies on a state interest in assuaging the discomfort of victims distressed that a criminal is profiting from his crime, that interest is unavailing for several reasons. First, alleviating public outrage is not an interest that the First Amendment permits government to advance by regulating books and other forms of expression. See Texas v. Johnson, — U.S. -, 109 S.Ct. 2533, 2544, 105 L.Ed.2d 342 (1989); Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46, 55-56, 108 S.Ct. 876, 881-82, 99 L.Ed.2d 41 (1988). Second, though the New York statute deters the publication of crime accounts by those who commit or are only accused of committing crimes and will result in preventing publication of some accounts, it does not prohibit such writings. Publishers who can find people willing to have their advance royalties escrowed for five years can still publish accounts of crime written or facilitated by the accused, and victims will still be distressed by knowing that criminals have pocketed all profits remaining after claims of victims and other creditors. Finally, the “victim outrage,” interest suffers from the same defect as the “victim compensation” interest— though the interest can be validly advanced by regulating all profits of crime, it cannot be advanced, consistent with the First Amendment, by singling out books of specified content for special regulation.
In addition to the fundamental vice of a content-based regulation of speech that is underinclusive, other aspects of section 632-a render it highly offensive to the First Amendment. Subsection 632-a(l) requires a publisher to submit to the Board all contracts and payments for books within the scope of the statute to be written by those accused of crime, not just those convicted. Though escrowed funds will be returned in the event of an acquittal, the statute deters, and in many cases prevents, the payment of advances for covered books to all persons accused of crime, even those later determined to be innocent. Many publishers will decline to make advance payments, rather than take the risk that the author claiming to be innocent will be convicted. From the undisputed affidavits in this case, it is clear that the prohibition of such advances will deter the writing of books by many innocent persons falsely accused of crime.
Another vice of the statute is the interpretation, applied by the Board in this case, that makes a publisher liable for any payments made to an author that are later determined to be covered by the statute in the event that the author declines to turn over the payments to the Board. That threat of a retroactive liability will make publishers extremely reluctant to make advances for books even arguably within the *787scope of the statute, a reluctance that, according to the undisputed affidavits, has already led to decisions not to publish books of high public interest.
Furthermore, the statute’s coverage of contracts and payments for books that include only a brief reference to an author’s crime or even to his “thoughts” about his crime will inevitably tend to impel publishers to purge manuscripts of all material arguably within the scope of the statute in order to escape its coverage and the risk of retroactive liability. The undisputed affidavits report that this has already occurred. Such governmentally induced suppression of speech is anathema (to the First Amendment.
New York understandably wishes to make sure that crime victims receive restitution from those who perpetrate crimes. To achieve that objective New York has enacted a comprehensive restitution statute, authorizing sentencing judges in every case to order restitution. N.Y. Penal Law § 60.27 (McKinney 1987). Nothing in the Constitution prevents enactment of such a comprehensive statute providing for restitution to crime victims. If that statute needs strengthening to increase its effectiveness, New York is free to adopt needed reforms. However, when New York, understandably outraged by the prospect that a criminal might profit from a book about his crime, tries to enact a victim restitution statute that applies only to protected speech, rather than all income-producing activity, and, then, only to speech of specified content, rather than all speech, it encounters First Amendment obstacles that in my judgment are insuperable.
Moreover, this statute is ill suited even to its objective of aiding victims. In the first eleven years of its operation, it has produced just five escrow accounts, three of which involved the same criminal. What little benefit to a handful of victims has thereby been achieved is more than offset by the royalties that would have been earned on books that were not published because of this statute. Such royalties would have been available for victim restitution under New York’s existing restitution statute, which is not confined to books, much less to books with specified content.
The issue of how best to secure restitution for crime victims involves policy judgments for the state legislature. Whether this statute employs a technique permitted by the First Amendment, however, is an issue ultimately to be decided by the judiciary. Any statute that has the obvious effect of preventing the publication of matters of legitimate public interest is constitutionally suspect. “Regulations which permit the Government to discriminate on the basis of the content of the message cannot be tolerated under the First Amendment.” Regan v. Time, Inc., 468 U.S. 641, 648-49, 104 S.Ct. 3262, 3267, 82 L.Ed.2d 487 (1984). We do not know how many books will not be published because of the existence of the challenged statute. Wiseguy, the book at issue in this case, and its film adaptation, GoodFellas, may not be profound additions to public understanding of crime, but they are significant contributions. The evidence is undisputed that observance of the requirements of the “Son of Sam” law when the book contract was first negotiated would have prevented the writing of this book. And its publisher does not engage in hyperbole by inviting us to consider whether it or any other firm would have published Where Do We Go From Here ? by Martin Luther King, Jr., Witness by Whitaker Chambers, or On Civil Disobedience by Henry' David Thoreau, had the crimes of these authors been committed in New York State while section 632-a was in effect.
From the judgment upholding the constitutionality of section 632-a, I respectfully dissent.