quotes:
The battle in the courts about American flag desecration goes back to 1907 when the Court in
Halter v. Nebraska upheld a state law that prohibited two businessmen from selling beer that had flag labels on the bottles. In 1968, Congress approved the Federal Flag Desecration Law after a Vietnam War protest. The law made it illegal to “knowingly” cast “contempt” upon “any flag of the United States by publicly mutilating, defacing, defiling, burning or trampling upon it.”
The Court moved closer to the
Johnson decision in 1974, when it held in
Spence v. Washington that a person couldn’t be convicted for using tape to put a peace sign on an American flag. The decision made it clear that a majority of the Court saw the act as protected expression under the First Amendment.
In 1984, Gregory Lee Johnson burned a flag at the Republican National Convention in Dallas. Officials in Texas arrested Johnson and convicted him of breaking a Texas law that prohibited desecration of the flag; he was sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay a $2,000 fine. The Court of Appeals for the Fifth District of Texas at Dallas affirmed Johnson's conviction, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed, and the Supreme Court affirmed.
In reaction to the
Johnson decision, which only applied to the Texas flag-desecration law, Congress passed a national anti-flag burning law called the Flag Protection Act of 1989. But in 1990, in
United States v. Eichman, the Court struck down that law as unconstitutional as well, in another 5-4 decision.
On June 21, 1989, a deeply divided United States Supreme Court upheld the rights of protesters to burn the American flag in a landmark First Amendment decision.
constitutioncenter.org
