THE FLORIDA STAR v. B. J. F.
No. 87-329
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued March 21, 1989—Decided June 21, 1989
491 U.S. 524
APPEAL FROM THE DISTRICT COURT OF APPEAL OF FLORIDA, FIRST DISTRICT
Joel D. Eaton argued the cause and filed a brief for appellee.*
JUSTICE MARSHALL delivered the opinion of the Court.
I
The Florida Star is a weekly newspaper which serves the community of Jacksonville, Florida, and which has an average circulation of approximately 18,000 copies. A regular feature of the newspaper is its “Police Reports” section.
On October 20, 1983, appellee B. J. F.2 reported to the Duval County, Florida, Sheriff‘s Department (Department) that she had been robbed and sexually assaulted by an unknown assailant. The Department prepared a report on the incident which identified B. J. F. by her full name. The Department then placed the report in its pressroom. The Department does not restrict access either to the pressroom or to the reports made available therein.
A Florida Star reporter-trainee sent to the pressroom copied the police report verbatim, including B. J. F.‘s full name, on a blank duplicate of the Department‘s forms. A Florida Star reporter then prepared a one-paragraph article about the crime, derived entirely from the trainee‘s copy of the police report. The article included B. J. F.‘s full name. It appeared in the “Robberies” subsection of the “Police Reports” section on October 29, 1983, one of 54 police blotter stories in that day‘s edition. The article read:
“[B. J. F.] reported on Thursday, October 20, she was crossing Brentwood Park, which is in the 500 block of Golfair Boulevard, enroute to her bus stop, when an unknown black man ran up behind the lady and placed a knife to her neck and told her not to yell. The suspect then undressed the lady and had sexual intercourse with her before fleeing the scene with her 60 cents, Timex watch and gold necklace. Patrol efforts have been suspended concerning this incident because of a lack of evidence.”
On September 26, 1984, B. J. F. filed suit in the Circuit Court of Duval County against the Department and The Florida Star, alleging that these parties negligently violated
At the ensuing daylong trial, B. J. F. testified that she had suffered emotional distress from the publication of her name. She stated that she had heard about the article from fellow workers and acquaintances; that her mother had received several threatening phone calls from a man who stated that he would rape B. J. F. again; and that these events had forced B. J. F. to change her phone number and residence, to seek police protection, and to obtain mental health counseling. In defense, The Florida Star put forth evidence indicating that the newspaper had learned B. J. F.‘s name from the incident report released by the Department, and that the newspaper‘s violation of its internal rule against publishing the names of sexual offense victims was inadvertent.
At the close of B. J. F.‘s case, and again at the close of its defense, The Florida Star moved for a directed verdict. On both occasions, the trial judge denied these motions. He ruled from the bench that
The First District Court of Appeal affirmed in a three-paragraph per curiam opinion. 499 So. 2d 883 (1986). In the paragraph devoted to The Florida Star‘s First Amendment claim, the court stated that the directed verdict for B. J. F. had been properly entered because, under
The Florida Star appealed to this Court.4 We noted probable jurisdiction, 488 U. S. 887 (1988), and now reverse.
The tension between the right which the First Amendment accords to a free press, on the one hand, and the protections which various statutes and common-law doctrines accord to personal privacy against the publication of truthful information, on the other, is a subject we have addressed several times in recent years. Our decisions in cases involving government attempts to sanction the accurate dissemination of information as invasive of privacy, have not, however, exhaustively considered this conflict. On the contrary, although our decisions have without exception upheld the press’ right to publish, we have emphasized each time that we were resolving this conflict only as it arose in a discrete factual context.5
The parties to this case frame their contentions in light of a trilogy of cases which have presented, in different contexts, the conflict between truthful reporting and state-protected privacy interests. In Cox Broadcasting Corp. v. Cohn, 420 U. S. 469 (1975), we found unconstitutional a civil damages award entered against a television station for broadcasting the name of a rape-murder victim which the station had obtained from courthouse records. In Oklahoma Publishing
Appellant takes the position that this case is indistinguishable from Cox Broadcasting. Brief for Appellant 8. Alternatively, it urges that our decisions in the above trilogy, and in other cases in which we have held that the right of the press to publish truth overcame asserted interests other than personal privacy,6 can be distilled to yield a broader First Amendment principle that the press may never be punished, civilly or criminally, for publishing the truth. Id., at 19. Appellee counters that the privacy trilogy is inapposite, because in each case the private information already appeared on a “public record,” Brief for Appellee 12, 24, 25, and because the privacy interests at stake were far less profound than in the present case. See, e. g., id., at 34. In the alternative, appellee urges that Cox Broadcasting be overruled and replaced with a categorical rule that publication of the
We conclude that imposing damages on appellant for publishing B. J. F.‘s name violates the First Amendment, although not for either of the reasons appellant urges. Despite the strong resemblance this case bears to Cox Broadcasting, that case cannot fairly be read as controlling here. The name of the rape victim in that case was obtained from courthouse records that were open to public inspection, a fact which JUSTICE WHITE‘S opinion for the Court repeatedly noted. 420 U. S., at 492 (noting “special protected nature of accurate reports of judicial proceedings“) (emphasis added); see also id., at 493, 496. Significantly, one of the reasons we gave in Cox Broadcasting for invalidating the challenged damages award was the important role the press plays in subjecting trials to public scrutiny and thereby helping guarantee their fairness. Id., at 492-493.7 That role is not directly compromised where, as here, the information in question comes from a police report prepared and disseminated at a time at which not only had no adversarial criminal proceedings begun, but no suspect had been identified.
Nor need we accept appellant‘s invitation to hold broadly that truthful publication may never be punished consistent with the First Amendment. Our cases have carefully eschewed reaching this ultimate question, mindful that the future may bring scenarios which prudence counsels our not resolving anticipatorily. See, e. g., Near v. Minnesota ex rel. Olson, 283 U. S. 697, 716 (1931) (hypothesizing “publication of the sailing dates of transports or the number and location of troops“); see also Garrison v. Louisiana, 379 U. S. 64, 72,
In our view, this case is appropriately analyzed with reference to such a limited First Amendment principle. It is the one, in fact, which we articulated in Daily Mail in our synthesis of prior cases involving attempts to punish truthful publication: “[I]f a newspaper lawfully obtains truthful information about a matter of public significance then state officials may not constitutionally punish publication of the information, absent a need to further a state interest of the highest order.” 443 U. S., at 103. According the press the ample protection provided by that principle is supported by at least three separate considerations, in addition to, of course, the overarching “‘public interest, secured by the Constitution, in the dissemination of truth.‘” Cox Broad-
First, because the Daily Mail formulation only protects the publication of information which a newspaper has “lawfully obtain[ed],” 443 U. S., at 103, the government retains ample means of safeguarding significant interests upon which publication may impinge, including protecting a rape victim‘s anonymity. To the extent sensitive information rests in private hands, the government may under some circumstances forbid its nonconsensual acquisition, thereby bringing outside of the Daily Mail principle the publication of any information so acquired. To the extent sensitive information is in the government‘s custody, it has even greater power to forestall or mitigate the injury caused by its release. The government may classify certain information, establish and enforce procedures ensuring its redacted release, and extend a damages remedy against the government or its officials where the government‘s mishandling of sensitive information leads to its dissemination. Where information is entrusted to the government, a less drastic means than punishing truthful publication almost always exists for guarding against the dissemination of private facts. See, e. g., Landmark Communications, supra, at 845 (“[M]uch of the risk [from disclosure of sensitive information regarding judicial disciplinary proceedings] can be eliminated through careful internal procedures to protect the confidentiality of Commission proceedings“); Oklahoma Publishing, 430 U. S., at 311 (noting trial judge‘s failure to avail himself of the opportunity, provided by a state statute, to close juvenile hearing to the public, including members of the press, who later broadcast juvenile defendant‘s name); Cox Broadcasting, supra, at 496 (“If there are privacy interests to be protected in judicial proceedings, the States must respond by means which
A second consideration undergirding the Daily Mail principle is the fact that punishing the press for its dissemination of information which is already publicly available is relatively unlikely to advance the interests in the service of which the State seeks to act. It is not, of course, always the case that information lawfully acquired by the press is known, or accessible, to others. But where the government has made certain information publicly available, it is highly anomalous to sanction persons other than the source of its release. We noted this anomaly in Cox Broadcasting: “By placing the information in the public domain on official court records, the State must be presumed to have concluded that the public interest was thereby being served.” 420 U. S., at 495. The Daily Mail formulation reflects the fact that it is a limited set of cases indeed where, despite the accessibility of the public to certain information, a meaningful public interest is served by restricting its further release by other entities, like the press. As Daily Mail observed in its summary of Oklahoma Publishing, “once the truthful information was ‘publicly revealed’ or ‘in the public domain’ the court could not constitutionally restrain its dissemination.” 443 U. S., at 103.
A third and final consideration is the “timidity and self-censorship” which may result from allowing the media to be punished for publishing certain truthful information. Cox Broadcasting, supra, at 496. Cox Broadcasting noted this concern with overdeterrence in the context of information made public through official court records, but the fear of ex-
Applied to the instant case, the Daily Mail principle clearly commands reversal. The first inquiry is whether the newspaper “lawfully obtain[ed] truthful information about a matter of public significance.” 443 U. S., at 103. It is undisputed that the news article describing the assault on B. J. F. was accurate. In addition, appellant lawfully obtained B. J. F.‘s name. Appellee‘s argument to the contrary is based on the fact that under Florida law, police reports which reveal the identity of the victim of a sexual offense are not among the matters of “public record” which the public, by law, is entitled to inspect. Brief for Appellee 17-18, citing
The second inquiry is whether imposing liability on appellant pursuant to
At a time in which we are daily reminded of the tragic reality of rape, it is undeniable that these are highly significant interests, a fact underscored by the Florida Legislature‘s explicit attempt to protect these interests by enacting a criminal statute prohibiting much dissemination of victim identities. We accordingly do not rule out the possibility that, in a proper case, imposing civil sanctions for publication of the name of a rape victim might be so overwhelmingly necessary to advance these interests as to satisfy the Daily Mail standard. For three independent reasons, however, imposing liability for publication under the circumstances of this case is too precipitous a means of advancing these interests to convince us that there is a “need” within the meaning of the Daily Mail formulation for Florida to take this extreme step. Cf. Landmark Communications, supra (invalidating penalty on publication despite State‘s expressed interest in non-
First is the manner in which appellant obtained the identifying information in question. As we have noted, where the government itself provides information to the media, it is most appropriate to assume that the government had, but failed to utilize, far more limited means of guarding against dissemination than the extreme step of punishing truthful speech. That assumption is richly borne out in this case. B. J. F.‘s identity would never have come to light were it not for the erroneous, if inadvertent, inclusion by the Department of her full name in an incident report made available in a pressroom open to the public. Florida‘s policy against disclosure of rape victims’ identities, reflected in
That appellant gained access to the information in question through a government news release makes it especially likely that, if liability were to be imposed, self-censorship would result. Reliance on a news release is a paradigmatically “routine newspaper reporting techniqu[e].” Daily Mail, supra, at 103. The government‘s issuance of such a release, without qualification, can only convey to recipients that the
A second problem with Florida‘s imposition of liability for publication is the broad sweep of the negligence per se standard applied under the civil cause of action implied from
Third, and finally, the facial underinclusiveness of
When a State attempts the extraordinary measure of punishing truthful publication in the name of privacy, it must demonstrate its commitment to advancing this interest by applying its prohibition evenhandedly, to the smalltime disseminator as well as the media giant. Where important First Amendment interests are at stake, the mass scope of disclosure is not an acceptable surrogate for injury. A ban on disclosures effected by “instrument[s] of mass communication” simply cannot be defended on the ground that partial prohibitions may effect partial relief. See Daily Mail, 443 U. S., at 104-105 (statute is insufficiently tailored to interest in protecting anonymity where it restricted only newspapers, not
III
Our holding today is limited. We do not hold that truthful publication is automatically constitutionally protected, or that there is no zone of personal privacy within which the State may protect the individual from intrusion by the press, or even that a State may never punish publication of the name of a victim of a sexual offense. We hold only that where a newspaper publishes truthful information which it has lawfully obtained, punishment may lawfully be imposed, if at all, only when narrowly tailored to a state interest of the highest order, and that no such interest is satisfactorily served by imposing liability under
Reversed.
JUSTICE SCALIA, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
I think it sufficient to decide this case to rely upon the third ground set forth in the Court‘s opinion, ante, at 540 and this page: that a law cannot be regarded as protecting an in-
This law has every appearance of a prohibition that society is prepared to impose upon the press but not upon itself. Such a prohibition does not protect an interest “of the highest order.” For that reason, I agree that the judgment of the court below must be reversed.
JUSTICE WHITE, with whom THE CHIEF JUSTICE and JUSTICE O‘CONNOR join, dissenting.
“Short of homicide, [rape] is the ‘ultimate violation of self.‘” Coker v. Georgia, 433 U. S. 584, 597 (1977) (opinion of WHITE, J.). For B. J. F., however, the violation she suffered at a rapist‘s knifepoint marked only the beginning of her ordeal. A week later, while her assailant was still at large, an account of this assault—identifying by name B. J. F. as the victim—was published by The Florida Star. As a result, B. J. F. received harassing phone calls, required mental health counseling, was forced to move from
The Court reaches its conclusion based on an analysis of three of our precedents and a concern with three particular aspects of the judgment against appellant. I consider each of these points in turn, and then consider some of the larger issues implicated by today‘s decision.
I
The Court finds its result compelled, or at least supported in varying degrees, by three of our prior cases: Cox Broadcasting Corp. v. Cohn, 420 U. S. 469 (1975); Oklahoma Publishing Co. v. Oklahoma County District Court, 430 U. S. 308 (1977); and Smith v. Daily Mail Publishing Co., 443 U. S. 97 (1979). I disagree. None of these cases requires the harsh outcome reached today.
Cox Broadcasting reversed a damages award entered against a television station, which had obtained a rape victim‘s name from public records maintained in connection with the judicial proceedings brought against her assailants. While there are similarities, critical aspects of that case make it wholly distinguishable from this one. First, in Cox Broadcasting, the victim‘s name had been disclosed in the hearing where her assailants pleaded guilty; and, as we recognized, judicial records have always been considered public information in this country. See Cox Broadcasting, supra, at 492-493. In fact, even the earliest notion of privacy rights exempted the information contained in judicial records from its protections. See Warren & Brandeis, The Right to Privacy, 4 Harv. L. Rev. 193, 216-217 (1890). Second, unlike the incident report at issue here, which was meant by state law to be withheld from public release, the judicial pro-
These facts—that the disclosure came in judicial proceedings, which were open to the public—were critical to our analysis in Cox Broadcasting. The distinction between that case and this one is made obvious by the penultimate paragraph of Cox Broadcasting:
“We are reluctant to embark on a course that would make public records generally available to the media but would forbid their publication if offensive . . . . [T]he First and Fourteenth Amendments will not allow exposing the press to liability for truthfully publishing information released to the public in official court records. If there are privacy interests to be protected in judicial proceedings, the States must respond by means which avoid public documentation or other exposure of private information. . . . Once true information is disclosed in public court documents open to public inspection, the press cannot be sanctioned for publishing it.” Cox Broadcasting, supra, at 496 (emphasis added).
Cox Broadcasting stands for the proposition that the State cannot make the press its first line of defense in withholding private information from the public—it cannot ask the press to secrete private facts that the State makes no effort to safeguard in the first place. In this case, however, the State has undertaken “means which avoid [but obviously, not altogether prevent] public documentation or other exposure of private information.” No doubt this is why the Court frankly admits that ”Cox Broadcasting . . . cannot fairly be read as controlling here.” Ante, at 532.
Finding Cox Broadcasting inadequate to support its result, the Court relies on Smith v. Daily Mail Publishing Co. as its
More importantly, at issue in Daily Mail was the disclosure of the name of the perpetrator of an infamous murder of a 15-year-old student. Id., at 99. Surely the rights of those accused of crimes and those who are their victims must differ with respect to privacy concerns. That is, whatever rights alleged criminals have to maintain their anonymity pending an adjudication of guilt—and after Daily Mail, those rights would seem to be minimal—the rights of crime victims to stay shielded from public view must be infinitely more substantial. Daily Mail was careful to state that the “holding in this case is narrow . . . there is no issue here of privacy.” Id., at 105 (emphasis added). But in this case, there is an issue of privacy—indeed, that is the principal issue—and therefore, this case falls outside of Daily Mail‘s “rule” . . . .
Consequently, I cannot agree that Cox Broadcasting, or Oklahoma Publishing, or Daily Mail requires—or even substantially supports—the result reached by the Court today.
II
We are left, then, to wonder whether the three “independent reasons” the Court cites for reversing the judgment for B. J. F. support its result. See ante, at 537-541.
The first of these reasons relied on by the Court is the fact “appellant gained access to [B. J. F.‘s name] through a government news release.” Ante, at 538. “The government‘s issuance of such a release, without qualification, can only convey to recipients that the government considered dissemination lawful,” the Court suggests. Ante, at 538-539. So described, this case begins to look like the situation in Oklahoma Publishing, where a judge invited reporters into his courtroom, but then tried to prohibit them from reporting on the proceedings they observed. But this case is profoundly different. Here, the “release” of information provided by the government was not, as the Court says, “without qualification.” As the Star‘s own reporter conceded at trial, the crime incident report that inadvertently included B. J. F.‘s name was posted in a room that contained signs making it clear that the names of rape victims were not matters of public record, and were not to be published. See 2 Record 113, 115, 117. The Star‘s reporter indicated that she understood that she “[was not] allowed to take down that information” (i. e., B. J. F.‘s name) and that she “[was] not supposed to take the information from the police department.” Id., at 117. Thus, by her own admission the posting of the incident report did not convey to the Star‘s reporter the idea that “the government considered dissemination lawful“; the Court‘s suggestion to the contrary is inapt.
But even taking the Court‘s concerns in the abstract, they miss the mark. Permitting liability under a negligence per se theory does not mean that defendants will be held liable without a showing of negligence, but rather, that the standard of care has been set by the legislature, instead of the courts. The Court says that negligence per se permits a plaintiff to hold a defendant liable without a showing that the disclosure was “of a fact about a person‘s private life . . . that a reasonable person would find highly offensive.” Ante, at 539. But the point here is that the legislature—reflecting popular sentiment—has determined that disclosure of the fact that a person was raped is categorically a revelation that reasonable people find offensive. And as for the Court‘s suggestion that the Florida courts’ theory permits liability without regard for whether the victim‘s identity is already
Third, the Court faults the Florida criminal statute for being underinclusive:
Moreover, the Court‘s “underinclusiveness” analysis itself is “underinclusive.” After all, the lawsuit against the Star which is at issue here is not an action for violating the statute which the Court deems underinclusive, but is, more accurately, for the negligent publication of appellee‘s name. See App. to Juris. Statement A10. The scheme which the Court should review, then, is not only
Consequently, neither the State‘s “dissemination” of B. J. F.‘s name, nor the standard of liability imposed here, nor the underinclusiveness of Florida tort law requires setting aside the verdict for B. J. F. And as noted above, such a result is not compelled by our cases. I turn, therefore, to the more general principles at issue here to see if they recommend the Court‘s result.
III
At issue in this case is whether there is any information about people, which—though true—may not be published in the press. By holding that only “a state interest of the highest order” permits the State to penalize the publication of truthful information, and by holding that protecting a rape victim‘s right to privacy is not among those state interests of the highest order, the Court accepts appellant‘s invitation, see Tr. of Oral Arg. 10-11, to obliterate one of the most noteworthy legal inventions of the 20th century: the tort of the publication of private facts. W. Prosser, J. Wade, & V. Schwartz, Torts 951-952 (8th ed. 1988). Even if the Court‘s opinion does not say as much today, such obliteration will follow inevitably from the Court‘s conclusion here. If the First Amendment prohibits wholly private per-
Of course, the right to privacy is not absolute. Even the article widely relied upon in cases vindicating privacy rights, Warren & Brandeis, The Right to Privacy, 4 Harv. L. Rev. 193 (1890), recognized that this right inevitably conflicts with the public‘s right to know about matters of general concern—and that sometimes, the latter must trump the former. Id., at 214-215. Resolving this conflict is a difficult matter, and I fault the Court not for attempting to strike an appropriate balance between the two, but rather, fault it for according too little weight to B. J. F.‘s side of equation, and too much on the other.
“Does the spirit of the Bill of Rights require that individuals be free to pry into the unnewsworthy private affairs of their fellowmen? In our view it does not. In our view, fairly defined areas of privacy must have the protection of law if the quality of life is to continue to be reasonably acceptable. The public‘s right to know is, then, subject to reasonable limitations so far as concerns the private facts of its individual members.” Virgil v. Time, Inc., 527 F. 2d 1122, 1128 (1975), cert. denied, 425 U. S. 998 (1976).
Ironically, this Court, too, had occasion to consider this same balance just a few weeks ago, in United States Department of Justice v. Reporters Committee for Freedom of Press, 489 U. S. 749 (1989). There, we were faced with a press request, under the Freedom of Information Act, for a “rap sheet” on a person accused of bribing a Congressman—presumably, a person whose privacy rights would be far less than B. J. F.‘s. Yet this Court rejected the media‘s request for disclosure of the “rap sheet,” saying:
“The privacy interest in maintaining the practical obscurity of rap-sheet information will always be high. When the subject of such a rap sheet is a private citizen and when the information is in the Government‘s control as a compilation, rather than as a record of ‘what the government is up to,’ the privacy interest . . . is . . . at its apex while the . . . public interest in disclosure is at its nadir.” Id., at 780.
The Court went on to conclude that disclosure of rap sheets “categorical[ly]” constitutes an “unwarranted” invasion of privacy. Ibid. The same surely must be true—indeed, much more so—for the disclosure of a rape victim‘s name.
I do not suggest that the Court‘s decision today is a radical departure from a previously charted course. The Court‘s
I would find a place to draw the line higher on the hillside: a spot high enough to protect B. J. F.‘s desire for privacy and peace-of-mind in the wake of a horrible personal tragedy. There is no public interest in publishing the names, addresses, and phone numbers of persons who are the victims of crime—and no public interest in immunizing the press from liability in the rare cases where a State‘s efforts to protect a victim‘s privacy have failed. Consequently, I respectfully dissent.5