WETHERSFIELD POLICE THREATS CASE

The Connecticut Supreme Court upheld a conviction for breach of the peace against challenges on 1st Amendment grounds. Read the Stamford Advocate story here, and the opinions in State v. DeLoreto here and here (pdf files).

One interesting aspect of the opinion is the way in which the U.S. Supreme Court's reasoning in Virginia v. Black (the cross-burning case) gets picked up by the CT Supreme Court, in particular the discussion of "true threats" as unprotected speech.

Part of the drama of the case concerns whether or not police officers should be presumed to be more "thick-skinned" than ordinary citizens (in other words, whether or not words that could be classed as "fighting words" when directed against ordinary citizens are nonetheless protected speech when spoken to a police officer). Part of the concern here, which the CT Supreme Court acknowledges in a reference to Justice Powell's concurring opinion in Lewis v. City of New Orleans (1974), is that statutes that punish words directed against the police may confer too much arbitrary authority on police officers. The New Orleans statute punished "obscene or opprobrious" directed at police officers, and the US Supreme Court ruled that the statute was overbroad.

It's not entirely clear to me how the "true threats" category deals with the problem that Powell was concerned with in Lewis. In the present case, it's fairly clear that DeLoreto was threatening the police officers, at least from the record as read by the CT Supreme Court. There's no reason why citizens who are members of the police force should have to tolerate serious threats simply because of their official position. It will be important to watch how this category plays itself out in future arrests and litigation, however.