North Carolina’s Commercial Social Networking Ban for Sex Offenders Is Unconstitutional

In Packingham v. North Carolina, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down G.S. 14-202.5, North Carolina's ban on sex offenders accessing commercial social networking websites. The law violates the First Amendment. I’ve been writing about Packingham since 2013 (the first mention was here), so I’ll give only a brief summary of the facts today. Lester Packingham is on the sex offender registry for indecent liberties with a child. In 2012, he was convicted after a jury trial for violating North Carolina’s commercial social networking ban for sex offenders for being on Facebook. The court of appeals reversed his conviction (as described here), concluding that the law was facially invalid under the First Amendment. State v. Packingham, 229 N.C. App. 293 (2013). The State sought and obtained review in the Supreme Court of North Carolina, which reversed the court of appeals and held that the law was “constitutional in all respects.” 368 N.C. 380, 381 (2015). The defendant appealed that decision to the Supreme Court, which granted certiorari. In a decision issued on Monday, the Supreme Court reversed North Carolina’s high court, holding that the statute is unconstitutional. All the justices agreed in the result. (Justice Gorsuch took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.) Writing for the Court, Justice Kennedy began by noting that the Packingham case is “one of the first this Court has taken to address the relationship between the First Amendment and the modern Internet.” Slip op. at 6. As such, he wrote, [...]