WEVV (Evansville) stories:
An Evansville lady is behind bars after police say she set an American flag on fireplace and hung up an ISIS flag….
Authorities say they arrested Sierra Malloy, who made a remark about reducing off two of the officer’s heads….
Malloy claimed to be ISIS and was saying homophobic slurs to officers.
Malloy was booked into the Vanderburgh County Jail for 2 counts of communication intimidation, felony trespass, felony mischief, and flag desecration.
It’s actually against the law to destroy another person’s flag, prefer it’s against the law to destroy different individuals’s property extra usually; that is the felony mischief cost. However it might’t be punished as “flag desecration.”
First, Indiana’s flag desecration legislation (“An individual who knowingly or deliberately mutilates, defaces, burns, or tramples any United States flag, normal, or ensign commits flag desecration, a Class A misdemeanor”) is unconstitutionally overbroad, as a result of it consists of constitutionally protected burning of a flag that you just your self personal. See Texas v. Johnson (1989).
Second, even a legislation that was restricted to burning different individuals’s U.S. flags could be unconstitutionally selective, in violation of R.A.V. v. Metropolis of St. Paul (1992). The legislation can punish all destruction of others’ property with out their consent, simply as (in R.A.V.) the legislation may punish all face-to-face preventing phrases. However when the legislation selectively targets explicit subcategories of the punishable conduct due to the message (and sure the point of view) that the conduct conveys (hostility to the flag on this case, bigotry in R.A.V.), that’s presumptively unconstitutional. And whereas some content-based distinctions inside unprotected speech or conduct is perhaps constitutional, as R.A.V. discusses, this would not be certainly one of them.
Due to Robbin Stewart for the pointer.
