"Fighting Words" and the First Amendment in Maine: State v. John W.

On April 1, 1979, John W. was driving his car, accompanied by his sister Maria. The car was stopped by a police officer who requested John's license and registration. Maria asked the officer why they had been stopped. When the officer remained silent, Maria became abusive and was arrested for disorderly conduct. John demanded to know what was going on. Ordered to get back into his car, John began shouting at the police: "Hey, turn around and come back here;" "Hey, you fucking pig, you fuckin' kangaroo;" "Fuck you." John was arrested and convicted in a juvenile proceeding of disorderly conduct, under section 501(2) of title 17-A, Maine Revised Statutes Annotated. Because section 501(2) punishes the use of words, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court in State v. John W. carefully analyzed this section of Maine's disorderly conduct statute in light of the first amendment to the United States Constitution and its counterpart, Art. I, § 4 of the Maine Constitution. Partly as a result of this analysis, John's conviction was overturned. The future constitutional validity of section 501(2) depends principally on whether the Maine court in John W. precluded the possibility of the section's application to speech protected by the first amendment. Without such a limitation, the statute may be impermissibly broad, in light of recent Supreme Court rulings. Using the so-called "overbreadth doctrine," the Supreme Court during the 1970's overturned several disorderly conduct convictions because the statute involved had not been judicially interpreted to exclude constitutionally protected speech from its sweep. In order for the statute to "pass constitutional muster," the Law Court must interpret it so that citizens have an objective and unambiguous standard for behavior. This Note will show that the opinion by Justice Roberts in John W., in its attempt to save the statute from constitutional infirmity, has made it difficult for police officers to determine when citizens should be arrested under section 501(2). As a result, an individual could be arrested and convicted for using constitutionally protected speech. This Note will also propose an amendment to section 501(2) designed to preclude the possibility that section 501(2) could be applied to constitutionally protected speech.