Court: Man’s basketball insults were free speech, not a crime
The Vermont Supreme Court has reversed a disorderly conduct conviction for a father who angrily approached his daughter’s basketball coach after a game.
The father’s right to free speech was violated, a unanimous high court concluded in an opinion released Friday.
A conviction could stand only if the father’s insults would provoke a reasonable person to violence, the court ruled. Insults that rise to that level, the justices agreed, are rare.
David Tracy, 47, confronted the volunteer coach, Stephany Hall, at her car in the parking lot of a Canaan school after a December 2012 junior high girls basketball game.
Tracy, who was upset that his 12-year-old daughter had not played, was accused of using profanity to insult the coach.
“You are not the ... NBA,” Tracy said, according to court documents, and walked away saying, “This will never be over.”
The court opinion that recounted the case was peppered with coarse language and profanity — quoting the insults Tracy was accused of hurling at his daughter’s coach.
A judge at Vermont Superior Court in Guildhall threw out a simple assault charge against Tracy arising from the incident. Tracy instead was convicted of disorderly conduct under a state law about “abusive or obscene language,” which correlates to the doctrine of “fighting words” under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
In a 5-0 decision, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction and emphasized that abusive speech almost always is protected.
Although Tracy was “vulgar, boorish, and just plain rude,” the court said, “he did not lob heinous accusations against the coach, or taunt her to fight him.”
“We cannot conclude ... that an average person in the coach’s position would reasonably be expected to respond to defendant’s harangue with violence,” Associate Justice Beth Robinson wrote on behalf of the court. “For that reason, defendant’s conviction of disorderly conduct by abusive language cannot stand.”
The court in its 22-page decision suggested Vermont’s abusive-language law is nearly obsolete.
“In a society in which children are admonished to ‘use your words’ rather than respond to anger and frustration by physically lashing out — and are taught the refrain, ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me,’ as an appropriate response to taunts — the class of insults for which violence is a reasonably expected response, if it exists at all, is necessarily exceedingly narrow,” Robinson wrote.
Essex County State’s Attorney Vince Illuzi said Tracy’s words and actions were “over the top” and the basketball coach felt threatened.
“It’s moved the boundary line further away from trying to prevent this type of behavior,” Illuzi said of the Supreme Court decision.
Attorney General William Sorrell said he hopes parents will interact respectfully with coaches and teachers regardless of the outcome of the case.
The ruling drew cheers from free speech advocate Allen Gilbert of the American Civil Liberties Union in Vermont. His organization was uninvolved with the case.
“The decision affirms Vermonters’ freedom to speak their minds, even if impolitely,” Gilbert said.
Vermont Defender General Matthew Valerio noted that the ruling accounts for changes in cultural norms since the 1950s, for example.
Valerio said the decision “puts a modern interpretation on the old ‘fighting words’ doctrine and kind of stands for the proposition that in today’s world, if you’re going to live in a free society, you’ve got to put up with some profanity.”
A message left at a phone number listed in Tracy’s name was not immediately returned.
EARLIER COVERAGE:
- Parent sentenced for disorderly conduct at Canaan school
- Dad guilty of using obscene language toward his daughter’s basketball coach
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Contact April Burbank at 802-660-1863 or aburbank@freepressmedia.com. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AprilBurbank