holding that the State may not “impose sanctions on the accurate publication of the name of a rape victim obtained from public records — more specifically, from judicial records which are maintained in connection with a public prosecution and which themselves are open to public inspection” notwithstanding the desire of the victim’s family to prevent disclosure of the victim’s name
How later courts described this case
- holding that the State may not “impose sanctions on the accurate publication of the name of a rape victim obtained from public records — more specifically, from judicial records which are maintained in connection with a public prosecution and which themselves are open to public inspection” notwithstanding the desire of the victim’s family to prevent disclosure of the victim’s name
- finding state court decision "final" in part because "[d]elaying final decision of the First Amendment claim until after trial will leave unanswered an important question of freedom of the press under the First Amendment, an uneasy and unsettled constitutional posture [that] could only further harm the operation of a free press"
- holding that a state could not impose sanctions for the accurate publication of the name of a rape victim that the reporter learned from an examination of publicly available indictments, explaining "the interests in privacy fade when the information involved already appears on the public record"
- holding that damages could not be recovered against a news organization for publishing the name of a rape- murder victim, in violation of a state criminal statute, where the reporter obtained the name by inspecting court documents the clerk provided him
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
Mr. Justice Douglas,
concurring in the judgment.
I agree that the state judgment is “final,” and I also agree in the reversal of the Georgia court. * On the *501 merits, the case for me is on all fours with New Jersey State Lottery Comm’n v. United States, 491 F. 2d 219 (CA3 1974), vacated and remanded, ante, p. 371. For the reasons I stated in my dissent from our disposition of that case, there is no power on the part of. government to suppress or penalize the publication of “news of the day.”
While I join in the narrow result reached by the Court, I write separately to emphasize that I would ground that result upon a far broader proposition, namely, that the First Amendment, made applicable to the States through the Fourteenth, prohibits the use of state law “to impose damages for merely discussing public affairs New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U. S. 254, 295 (1964) (Black, J., concurring). See also Cantrell v. Forest City Publishing Co., 419 U.S. 245, 254 (1974) (Douglas, J., dissenting); Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U. S. 323, 355 (1974) (Douglas, J., dissenting) ; Time, Inc. v. Hill, 385 U. S. 374, 398 (1967) (Black, J., concurring) ; id., at 401 (Douglas, J., concurring); Garrison v. Louisiana, 379 U. S. 64, 80 (1964) (Douglas, J., concurring). In this context, of course, “public affairs” must be broadly construed— indeed, the term may be said to embrace “any matter of sufficient general interest to prompt media coverage . . . .” Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., supra, at 357 n. 6 (Douglas, J., dissenting). By its now-familiar process of balancing and accommodating First Amendment *501 freedoms with state or individual interests, the Court raises a specter of liability which must inevitably induce self-censorship by the media, thereby inhibiting the rough-and-tumble discourse which the First Amendment so clearly protects.