R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul

R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued December 4, 1991 Decided June 22, 1992
Full case name	R.A.V., Petitioner v. City of St. Paul, Minnesota
Docket nos.	90-7675
Citations	505 U.S. 377 (more) 112 S. Ct. 2538; 120 L. Ed. 2d 305; 1992 U.S. LEXIS 3863; 60 U.S.L.W. 4667; 92 Cal. Daily Op. Service 5299; 92 Daily Journal DAR 8395; 6 Fla. L. Weekly Fed. S 479
Argument	Oral argument
Prior history	Statute upheld as constitutional and charges reinstated, 464 N.W.2d 507 (Minn. 1991)
Holding
The St. Paul Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance was struck down both because it was overbroad, proscribing both "fighting words" and protected speech, and because the regulation was "content-based," proscribing only activities which conveyed messages concerning particular topics. Judgment of the Supreme Court of Minnesota reversed.
Court membership
Case opinions
Majority	Scalia, joined by Rehnquist, Kennedy, Souter, and Thomas
Concurrence	White, joined by Blackmun, O'Connor, and Stevens (in part)
Concurrence	Blackmun
Concurrence	Stevens, joined by White (in part) and Blackmun (in part)
Laws applied
U.S. Const., amend. I; St. Paul, Minn., Legis. Code § 292.02 (1990)

R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377 (1992) was a United States Supreme Court case involving hate speech and the free speech clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. A unanimous Court struck down St. Paul, Minnesota's Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance, and in doing so overturned the conviction of a teenager, referred to in court documents only as R.A.V., for burning a cross on the lawn of an African American family.

In the early morning hours of June 21, 1990, the petitioner and several other teenagers allegedly assembled a crudely made cross by taping together broken chair legs. The cross was erected and burned in the front yard of an African American family that lived across the street from the house where the petitioner was staying. Petitioner, who was a juvenile at the time, was charged with two counts, one of which a violation of the St. Paul Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance. The Ordinance provided:

Petitioner moved to dismiss the count under the Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance on the ground that it was substantially overbroad and impermissibly content based, and therefore facially invalid under the First Amendment. The trial court granted the motion, but the Minnesota Supreme Court reversed, rejecting petitioner's overbreadth claim because, as the Minnesota Court had construed the Ordinance in prior cases, the phrase "arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others" limited the reach of the ordinance to conduct that amounted to fighting words under the Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire decision. The Minnesota Court also concluded that the ordinance was not impermissibly content based because "the ordinance is a narrowly tailored means towards accomplishing the compelling governmental interest in protecting the community against bias-motivated threats to public safety and order." Petitioner appealed, and the United States Supreme Court granted certiorari.