Newspaper Can Be Prosecuted for Publishing Home Addresses of Police, Prosecutors, and Judges
From the opinion in Kratovil v. City of New Brunswick:
The Legislature enacted Daniel’s Law “to enhance the safety and security of certain public officials in the justice system,” thereby enabling those officials to “carry out their official duties without fear of personal reprisal.” Subject to strict notice requirements [under which the official must first demand that the information be removed and not published -EV], Daniel’s Law prescribes a procedure by which the home address and unpublished home telephone number of a public official designated as a “covered person” can be protected from disclosure or redisclosure. Daniel’s Law imposes civil liability on persons, businesses, and associations that violate the statute, and provides for criminal liability for reckless or intentional violations…
In 2023, plaintiff Charles Kratovil learned through a records request pursuant to the Open Public Records Act (OPRA), that the voting address of defendant Anthony Caputo, the New Brunswick Police Director, was in the Borough of Cape May. Kratovil began working on a story about Caputo’s residence. After Kratovil disclosed Caputo’s address to local officials, Caputo notified Kratovil that he was a covered person under Daniel’s Law and requested that Kratovil refrain from republishing his exact home address.
The New Jersey Supreme Court upheld the statute. It cited various Supreme Court precedents, including Florida Star v. B.J.F. (1988), which held (in striking down a ban on publishing the names of rape victims):
We do not hold that truthful publication is automatically constitutionally protected, or that there is no zone of personal privacy within which the State may protect the individual from intrusion by the press, or even that a State may never punish publication of the name of a victim of a sexual offense. We hold only that where a newspaper publishes truthful information which it has lawfully obtained, punishment may lawfully be imposed, if at all, only when narrowly tailored to a state interest of the highest order, and that no such interest is satisfactorily served by imposing liability under [the Florida statute] … under the facts of this case….
And here’s how it applied the precedents:
[1.] Our first inquiry is whether Caputo’s home address is truthful information that was lawfully obtained and is of public significance…. Kratovil lawfully obtained Caputo’s home address from the records custodian of the Cape May Board of Elections in response to an OPRA request…. [T]here is no indication in the record that Kratovil violated any law in his communications with the custodian.
We do not conclude that because Kratovil was permitted to write a story identifying Cape May as the municipality where Caputo lived without including his precise home address, this case does not involve a matter of public concern. In Florida Star, the Court did not frame the question to be whether the crime victim’s name was itself a matter of public concern, but whether the subject of the news article was a matter of public concern. It found that the subject of the article—violent crime investigated by law enforcement—was a matter of public concern.
In the specific setting of this appeal, the contested information—Caputo’s exact home address in Cape May—is related to Kratovil’s proposed story suggesting that Caputo lived too far from New Brunswick to effectively discharge his public duties. The subject matter of the story—a public official’s alleged failure to perfor
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