The ACLU Takes Aim at Criminal-Defamation Laws
Earlier this year, Robert Frese, a 63-year-old living in a mobile-home park in New Hampshire, posted a pseudonymous Facebook comment declaring that a local police chief was too cowardly to do anything about an allegedly corrupt subordinate. The cops treated that post as a crime. Did that violate the Facebook commenter’s constitutional rights?
Defamation is often thought of as a matter for civil court, where a wronged party can seek recompense for many false, injurious statements. Twenty-five states, though, have criminal-defamation statutes. New Hampshire’s declares that “a person is guilty of a class B misdemeanor if he purposely communicates to any person, orally or in writing, any information which he knows to be false and knows will tend to expose any other living person to public hatred, contempt or ridicule.”
On Tuesday, Frese sued New Hampshire Attorney General Gordon MacDonald in hopes of permanently invalidating that criminal-defamation law. He is represented by the ACLU, which opposes all criminal laws against defamation, and wants to use Frese v. MacDonald as a test case to challenge their validity.
Robert Frese’s strange story is perhaps best begun in 2012. He repeatedly posted comments on Craigslist alleging that a local life-coaching business was “a scam.” That May, the Hudson Police
