Fourth Circuit Affirms Doe v. Cooper

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit issued its opinion in Doe v. Cooper yesterday. A unanimous panel of the court affirmed a decision from Middle District of North Carolina finding two parts of G.S. 14-208.18—North Carolina’s premises restrictions for certain sex offenders—unconstitutional. If it feels like we’ve been talking about Doe v. Cooper on the blog forever, it’s because we have been. Previous posts have followed the case from the trial judge’s ruling on a preliminary injunction, 40 F. Supp. 3d 657 (M.D.N.C. 2014), to the judge’s injunctions of portions of the law (here and here), to the General Assembly’s amendment of the law in response to the federal court decisions (here). With those prior posts available, I’ll skip a full recap of the procedural history of this case. It is, in short, a federal civil rights lawsuit in which five sex offenders sued the governor, the attorney general, and every elected district attorney in the state to block enforcement of the sex offender premises restrictions on constitutional grounds. The sex offenders won in the trial court; a federal district judge in the Middle District concluded that portions of the law were indeed unconstitutional. Subdivision (a)(2) of G.S. 14-208.18—the so-called 300-foot rule—was invalidated as overbroad under the First Amendment. Subdivision (a)(3)—the rule that banned covered offenders from any place where minors gathered for “regularly scheduled” programs—was deemed vague as a matter of constitutional due process. Subdivision (a)(1), which bars covered offenders from child-focused places like schools and [...]