Juliette Grimmett v. Nancy Freeman, No. 22-1844 (4th Cir. 2023)
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A 90-year-old North Carolina law makes it a crime to publish a “derogatory report” about candidates for public office where the speaker “know[s] such report to be false or” acts “in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity.” N.C. Gen. Stat. Section 163-274(a)(9). Plaintiffs asserted this statute violates the First Amendment. The district court denied a preliminary injunction because it determined plaintiffs were unlikely to succeed on the merits.
The Fourth Circuit vacated the district court’s order and remanded for further proceedings. The court reasoned that the district attorney offered no examples of this Act’s “legitimate applications”—much less applications unrelated to speech—nor has she shown any such applications should mitigate the Court’s concerns about the law’s chilling effects on truthful speech during political campaigns. Second, even assuming the Act reaches only false statements and that Garrison’s seeming approval of certain criminal libel statutes remains good law, the Court would still conclude this Act fails constitutional scrutiny because it draws impermissible content-based distinctions in identifying which speech to criminalize.
This opinion or order relates to an opinion or order originally issued on August 25, 2022.
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