FIRE has the details, though you can also read the full brief (written by FIRE's Adam Steinbaugh and me, with many thanks to our excellent local counsel Zachary Phillipps of Wofsey Rosen Kewskin & Kuriansky, LLP). I've been writing about this law since 2010, so I'm especially pleased to have been involved in this case, where I hope the law will finally be cut back. Here's a long excerpt from FIRE's summary, written by Adam Steinbaugh:
Connecticut's "racial ridicule" statute (Gen. Stat. § 53-37) [enacted in 1917] provides:
Any person who, by his advertisement, ridicules or holds up to contempt any person or class of persons, on account of the creed, religion, color, denomination, nationality or race of such person or class of persons, shall be guilty of a class D misdemeanor.
By its plain terms, the law only applies to an "advertisement" of some sort…. But that's not how police and prosecutors in Connecticut treat the law in practice. In 2019, for example, police at the University of Connecticut tracked and arrested several students for "playing a game" in which they uttered vulgar, transgressive words at a progressively louder volume—starting with "penis" and later replacing it with "nigger"—while walking through a parking lot. They weren't saying the words to anyone in particular, and the only way people learned what the students were saying was when someone turned up the volume on a cell phone recording.
The university's police launched an 11-day investigation using drivers' licenses, the surveillance cameras, WiFi phone access data, and card swipe data to figure out who the students were. When police identified them, the students were arrested and charged with violating the "racial ridicule" law.
What were the students advertising? Nothing. Still, they were being arrested under this law. This raised the question: Who else was?
This year, to learn how police were actually applying the law, FIRE undertook a broader search for records, expanding on similar requests first issued by Professor Volokh. The records we found—all of which are included in the brief—demonstrate that the UConn students do not represent a one-off example of police and prosecutors applying the law outside the context of advertisements. In fact, of the dozens of arrests, charges, and convictions we documented, none had anything to do with commercial advertisements.
