Edwards v. South Carolina

Using the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court made it illegal for states to criminalize peaceful expressions of unpopular views.

On the morning of 2 March 1961, roughly 200 African American high school and college students assembled at the Zion Baptist Church in Columbia, South Carolina. They proceeded to walk, in groups of 15, to the nearby state house grounds, an area open to the public. Their purpose in doing so was to protest segregation, a message they conveyed by peacefully carrying placards as they walked through the grounds. A small, quiet crowd gathered to watch them, and the police then informed them that they had 15 minutes to leave the premises. When the students responded by singing "The Star Spangled Banner" and other patriotic and religious songs, they were arrested and charged with breaching the peace, a crime under the common law of South Carolina.

Convicted and sentenced with small fines and jail sentences of up to 30 days, the students appealed their cases to the state supreme court, which upheld the convictions for an offense that even the appellate court admitted was only vaguely defined. The students then petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for review of this decision.

The Supreme Court declared that the students' convictions violated their rights of free speech, free assembly, and the freedom to petition government for redress of grievances. All of these rights, the Court said, were assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which makes fundamental guarantees of the Bill of Rights binding upon the states. The arbitrariness and egregiousness of South Carolina's violation of the petitioners' rights was manifest in the fact that they were not convicted of having violated any proper statute, only an ill-defined rule:

We do not review in this case criminal convictions resulting from the evenhanded application of a precise and narrowly drawn regulatory statute evincing a legislative judgment that certain specific conduct be limited or proscribed. If, for example, the petitioners had been convicted upon evidence that they had violated a law regulating traffic, or had disobeyed a law reasonably limiting the periods during which the State House grounds were open to the public, this would be a different case.