Parties: Hess v. Indiana
Date: 1973-11-19
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Paragraph: 3 - Indiana's disorderly conduct statute was applied in this case to punish only spoken words. It hardly needs repeating that '(t)he constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech forbid the States to punish the use of words or language not within 'narrowly limited classes of speech." Gooding v. Wilson, supra, 405 U.S. at 521—522, 92 S.Ct. at 1106. The words here did not fall within any of these 'limited classes.' In the first place, it is clear that the Indiana court specifically abjured any suggestion that Hess' words could be punished as obscene under Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476, 77 S.Ct. 1304, 1 L.Ed.2d 1498 (1957), and its progeny. Indeed, after Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15, 91 S.Ct. 1780, 29 L.Ed.2d 418 (1971), such a contention with regard to the language at issue would not be tenable. By the same token, any suggestion that Hess' speech amounted to 'fighting words,' Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568, 62 S.Ct. 766, 86 L.Ed. 1031 (1942), could not withstand scrutiny.
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Phrase match: of freedom of speech forbid the
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