Court Opinion

ID: 9528647
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 03:42:46.771385+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:27:10.723427
License: Public Domain

LINDE, J.,
concurring.
The trial court held the “harassment” statute unconstitutional because its prohibition involved only words “communicated to the addressee over a distance, not face to face, and * * * not connected to any other element requiring conduct by the addressee” nor any present ability of the speaker to carry out the threat. Taking the statute to mean what its words say, that conclusion was perfectly reasonable. The Court of Appeals, in turn, attempted to save the statute by invoking a supposed historical antecedent which, as this Court notes, exemplified the kind of repression that motivated adoption of the constitutional guarantees of free expression.1
Because the statute requires the accomplishment of a concrete result (alarm) beyond speech or writing itself, its critical problem, as in the case of the “coercion” statute invalidated in State v. Robertson, 293 Or 402, 649 P2d 569 (1982), is overbreadth. The Court has undertaken heroic measures to save the harassment statute from the same fate. What remains of it may leave little of what its legislative sponsors hoped to accomplish. The factfinder must be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, on adequate evidence, that the threat of felonious violence was objectively “real,” that is to say, intended and likely to be carried to the point of a breach of the peace. This will not be easy to show when the threat is made by telephone or writing rather than face-to-face, as the trial court said. It will not protect people from *710being annoyed or alarmed by spiteful messages or by irresponsible pranks, as the legislation probably was meant to do.2
The Court recognizes that there still may remain situations to which the statute could not constitutionally be applied, because the threatened breach of the peace is too remote or perhaps because the words are otherwise privileged under the circumstances. But our present task is only to determine whether the statute must be altogether invalidated. The Court is content to leave the questions of its constitutional application to subsequent cases, and so am I.

 Under State v. Robertson, 293 Or 402, 412, 649 P2d 569 (1982), the state’s burden is to show not only that a historical exception was “well established when the first American guarantees of freedom were adopted” but also that “the guarantees then or in 1859 demonstrably were not intended to reach” it.

Nothing in the Court’s opinion prevents the legislature from providing a nonpunitive civil remedy for the private harm caused by an “abuse” of speech or writing, Or Const Art I, § 10, Hall v. May Department Stores Co., 292 Or 131, 146-47, 637 P2d 126 (1984), including a scheme under which public officers investigate and prosecute the victim’s claim, as they now must do in order to prosecute a criminal charge under ORS 166.065(l)(d).