Supreme Court rules Sex Offenders have First Amendment Right to use Social Media in Packingham v. North Carolina

Packingham v. North Carolina, 582 U.S. 98 (2017), is a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that a North Carolinastatute that prohibited registered sex offendersfrom using social media websites was unconstitutional because it violated the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects freedom of speech.^[1]

Packingham v. North Carolina
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued February 27, 2017 Decided June 19, 2017
Full case name	Lester Gerard Packingham, Petitioner v. North Carolina
Docket no.	15–1194
Citations	582 U.S. 98 (more) 137 S. Ct. 1730; 198 L. Ed. 2d 273
Argument	Oral argument
Opinion announcement	Opinion announcement
Case history
Prior	State v. Packingham, 368 N.C. 380, 777 S.E.2d 738 (2015); cert. granted, 137 S. Ct. 368 (2016).
Holding
A statute prohibiting registered sex offenders from accessing social media websites impermissibly restricts lawful speech in violation of the First Amendment.
Court membership
Chief Justice John Roberts Associate Justices Anthony Kennedy ·  Clarence Thomas Ruth Bader Ginsburg ·  Stephen Breyer Samuel Alito ·  Sonia Sotomayor Elena Kagan ·  Neil Gorsuch
Case opinions
Majority	Kennedy, joined by Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan
Concurrence	Alito (in judgment), joined by Roberts, Thomas
Gorsuch took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. I

In 2010, Lester Gerard Packingham, a registered sex offender, posted on Facebook under a pseudonym to comment favorably on a recent traffic court experience. Police then identified Packingham and charged him with violating North Carolina's law. Packingham moved to dismiss the charges, arguing that the state's law violated the First Amendment. The trial court dismissed this motion and ultimately convicted Packingham. A state appellate court initially reversed the trial court, holding that the law did violate the First Amendment, but the North Carolina Supreme Court, the state's highest court, disagreed and reinstated the conviction.

In June 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed the North Carolina Supreme Court's judgment. In the majority opinion authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court held that social media—defined broadly to include Facebook, Amazon.com, The Washington Post, and WebMD, among many others—is a "protected space" under the First Amendment for lawful speech.^[2] The Court offered that North Carolina could protect children through less restrictive means, such as prohibiting "conduct that often presages a sexual crime, like contacting a minor or using a website to gather information about a minor".^[3]