Parties: Edwards v. South Carolina
Date: 1963-02-25
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Paragraph: 13 - The Fourteenth Amendment does not permit a State to make criminal the peaceful expression of unpopular views. '(A) function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea. That is why freedom of speech * * * is * * * protected against censorship or punishment, unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance, or unrest. * * * There is no room under our Constitution for a more restrictive view. For the alternative would lead to standardization of ideas either by legislatures, courts, or dominant political or community groups.'
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Paragraph: 18 - The convictions of the petitioners, Negro high school and college students, for breach of the peace under South Carolina law are accepted by the Court 'as binding upon us to that extent' but are held violative of 'petitioners' constitutionally protected rights of free speech, free assembly, and freedom to petition for redress of their grievances.' Petitioners, of course, had a right to peaceable assembly, to espouse their cause and to petition, but in my view the manner in which they exercised those rights was by no means the passive demonstration which this Court relates; rather, as the City Manager of Columbia testified, 'a dangerous situation was really building up' which South Carolina's courts expressly found had created 'an actual interference with traffic and an imminently threatened disturbance of the peace of the community.'
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Paragraph: 25 - N48* 'Where conduct is within the allowable limits of free speech, the police are peace officers for the speaker as well as for his hearers. But the power effectively to preserve order cannot be displaced by giving a speaker complete immunity. Here, there were two police officers present for 20 minutes. They interfered only when they apprehended imminence of violence. It is not a constitutional principle that, in acting to preserve order, the police must proceed against the crowd, whatever its size and temper, and not against the (demonstrators).'
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Paragraph: 13 - The Fourteenth Amendment does not permit a State to make criminal the peaceful expression of unpopular views. N38* '(A) function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea. That is why freedom of speech * * * is * * * protected against censorship or punishment, unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance, or unrest. * * * There is no room under our Constitution for a more restrictive view. For the alternative would lead to standardization of ideas either by legislatures, courts, or dominant political or community groups.'
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Paragraph: 18 - The convictions of the petitioners, Negro high school and college students, for breach of the peace under South Carolina law are accepted by the Court 'as binding upon us to that extent' but are held violative of 'petitioners' constitutionally protected rights of free speech, free assembly, and freedom to petition for redress of their grievances.' Petitioners, of course, had a right to peaceable assembly, to espouse their cause and to petition, but in my view the manner in which they exercised those rights was by no means the passive demonstration which this Court relates; rather, as the City Manager of Columbia testified, 'a dangerous situation was really building up' which South Carolina's courts expressly found had created 'an actual interference with traffic and an imminently threatened disturbance of the peace of the community.'
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Paragraph: 21 - The question thus seems to me whether a State is constitutionally prohibited from enforcing laws to prevent breach of the peace in a situation where city officials in good faith believe, and the record shows, that disorder and violence are imminent, merely because the activities constituting that breach contain claimed elements of constitutionally protected speech and assembly. To me the answer under our cases is clearly in the negative.
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Paragraph: 22 - Beginning, as did the South Carolina courts, with the premise that the petitioners were entitled to assemble and voice their dissatisfaction with segregation, the enlargement of constitutional protection for the conduct here is as fallacious as would be the conclusion that free speech necessarily includes the right to broadcast from a sound truck in the public streets. Kovacs v. Cooper, 336 U.S. 77, 69 S.Ct. 448, 93 L.Ed. 513 (1949). This Court said in Thornhill v. Alabama, 310 U.S. 88, 105, 60 S.Ct. 736, 745, 84 L.Ed. 1093 (1940), that N40* '(t)he power and the duty of the State to take adequate steps to preserve the peace and to protect the privacy, the lives, and the property of its residents cannot be doubted.' Significantly, in holding that the petitioner's picketing was constitutionally protected in that case the Court took pains to differeniate it from N41* 'picketing en masse or otherwise conducted which might occasion * * * imminent and aggravated danger * * *.' Ibid. Here the petitioners were permitted without hindrance to exercise their rights of free speech and assembly. Their arrests occurred only after a situation arose in which the law-enforcement officials on the scene considered that a dangerous disturbance was imminent.
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Paragraph: 9 - N42* it is clear to us that in arresting, convicting, and punishing the petitioners under the circumstances disclosed by this record, South Carolina infringed the petitioners' constitutionally protected rights of free speech, free assembly, and freedom to petition for redress of their grievances.
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Paragraph: 13 - The Fourteenth Amendment does not permit a State to make criminal the peaceful expression of unpopular views. N43* '(A) function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea. That is why freedom of speech * * * is * * * protected against censorship or punishment, unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance, or unrest. * * * There is no room under our Constitution for a more restrictive view. For the alternative would lead to standardization of ideas either by legislatures, courts, or dominant political or community groups.' Terminiello v. Chicago, 337 U.S. 1, 4—5, 69 S.Ct. 894, 896, 93 L.Ed. 1131. As in the Terminiello case, the courts of South Carolina have defined a criminal offense so as to permit conviction of the petitioners if their speech N44* 'stirred people to anger, invited public dispute, or brought about a condition of unrest. A conviction resting on any of those grounds may not stand.'
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