Media and Other Individuals From

¶ … media and other individuals from abusing the right of free speech. Make sure your discussion identifies the amendment that guarantees these rights.

The First Amendment guarantees people the right to freedom of speech. However, freedom of speech may be one of the least-understood of all the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. Freedom of speech only applies to the government; private citizens taking action to restrict speech rarely creates a constitutional issue. Moreover, not all speech is protected. While political and religious speech are almost always protected, other types of speech can be much more stridently confined. Finally, some of the restrictions to free speech have been the result of perceived abuses of that right. The guidelines that have been developed to keep people from abusing the right to free speech include civil liability for libel or slander, restrictions on commercial speech, restrictions against obscenity, and restrictions against fighting words or incitement.

The government is permitted to have civil laws permitting private recovery for libel or slander and civil laws prohibiting fraudulent commercial speech, because the First Amendment was not intended to protect lies. Because the United States' guarantee of free speech makes it virtually impossible to prohibit the publication of any type of speech, it can be very difficult to undo the damage done by some of that speech. Therefore, the government has chosen to make civil remedies available. When the media intentionally engage in slander or libel, the impacted individual can collect damages. Though it is more difficult for a public figure to prove slander, the fact remains that slandered individuals can recover if they can demonstrate malice and that the printed information was incorrect. In addition, the government has an interest in regulating commercial speech to provide for consumer protection. Advertisements have to contain essentially truthful information, and, the more highly regulated the industry, such as pharmaceuticals, the more specific the advertising guidelines can be. Again, this is a scenario where the potential for damage from false statements is tremendously high.

While false statements obviously should not have First Amendment protection, the next area of limitation is more troubling. The government has long been permitted to regulate speech that is likely to cause harm. For example, the government may regulate obscenity, even though the definition of obscene is notoriously amorphous. Moreover, the more highly linked obscene material is to other illegal activity, the easier it is to regulate it. For example, while it would be unconstitutional to completely ban the sale of adult pornography, child pornography, which involves the victimization of a child in its creation, can be criminal to possess, much less to disseminate. In fact, when actual harm seems imminent, the government has more leeway to restrict the speech. Fighting words or words likely to result in harm to an individual fall into this category. The most notorious example is shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater. A more realistic example is the criminalization of terroristic threats.

2) in an essay of at least two well-developed paragraphs, explain how laws related to capital punishment have changed since the early 1970s

At the beginning of the 1970s, capital punishment was legal throughout the United States, though execution rates varied tremendously by state. However, in 1972, in the case of Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972), the Supreme Court suspended capital punishment throughout the states. The Court found that capital punishment violated the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. However, it is important to realize that the violation did not come from the actual executions, but from the way that the states carried out their capital punishment procedures. Therefore, beginning in 1976, many states retooled their capital punishment laws and, once again, began sentencing defendants to death.