Connecticut General Statutes § 53-37 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 fined not more than fifty dollars or imprisoned not more than thirty days or both."
Yet despite its text, Connecticut prosecutors haven't been enforcing the law as limited to "advertisement[s]." The two most-publicized recent incidents (see the UConn case and the Fairfield Warde High School case), for instance, involve nothing that could be labeled an advertisement. And in some earlier incidents—about a dozen that I've seen, going back about 20 years—prosecutors seemed to be mostly enforcing the statute to punish people for race- or religion-based "fighting words": generally speaking, face-to-face personal insults that include racial slurs or, in one case I found, religious slurs. Such fighting words might be punishable through specialized statutes that cover racist fighting words alongside other fighting words. But by its text, the "racial ridicule" statute doesn't extend to them, and the prosecutions I describe (some of which led to convictions) strike me as entirely legally unjustified.
