Where would that leave someone, a la John Kerry, who won an award and wants to protest government actions by, for example, throwing the award into the river?
Up on charges of destroying government property? But then there’s that pesky First Amendment…
Well, as long as nobody fishes them out and starts wearing them, doesn’t seem like an issue to me.
But let’s say I start up a shop that manufactures Medals of Honor, Purple Hearts, and the Navy Distinguished Public Service Award medals. They are exact replicas – but the government never owned or possessed them. Such a law would not prevent anyone from buying them, and I have a hard time seeing how manufacturing them could be made illegal.
I’m one of those who supported the law, but the more I think about it, I have a hard time coming up with a strong case why the First Amendment would not apply to someone wearing a medal they didn’t earn. I guess they will just have to contend with being total jerk-faces while I wish them all kinds of ill fortune.
Oh, come now. There’s already well-established Federal law on this issue:
That is to say, we make it illegal to make replica US medals, just like with money or bonds, not that it’s already illegal.
If the medal is the property of the U.S. government, might it not run the danger of being used to criminalize the actions of a protestor who destroyed or discarded medals he or she had won?
Well, that depends. There was no language in my proposal which would criminalize such action.
Do we?
Does a military medal fall under the definition of “obligations or securities”? I’m not a lawyer, and i don’t know the answer to that question. Perhaps you could point me in the right direction.
Also, a condition of the section you quote is “with intent to defraud.” Does simply owning and wearing a fake medal constitute intent to defraud?
Yes there was. If something is the property of the U.S. government, and you throw it away or destroy it, you have committed a crime.
No, it doesn’t. Hence my postscript, “let’s make it illegal”. Obligations and securities refers solely to negotiable financial instruments.
The sections of the Code which make destroying specific Federal property illegal also specifically criminalize their destruction. We’d just leave out that language. Alternatively, you could simply include a clause to the effect that a holder of a US military decoration may destroy it without criminal penalty.
That’s what the Stolen Valor Act already does, and it has been struck down as unconstitutional.
Here’s the text of one part of the act:
Obviously there is a difference between a bond and a medal in that people pay for bonds, and the government has a direct interest in maintaining the value of that piece of paper (see “debt of the United States shall not be questioned”); and a medal generally has little inherent value, but can have lots of imputed value.
Now, if we recognize that the value of a medal is primarily what is “says,” (this person is brave, that person has been wounded, etc), rather than what it could be traded for, then we would seem to land in the territory of whether or not wearing or manufacturing medals is speech. Manufacturing bonds would obviously be an attempt to steal someone’s money. That’s a big difference.
But your postscript didn’t say “Let’s make it illegal.”
Your postscript said “we make it illegal,” implying that medals already fall under the laws against counterfeiting obligations and securities.
Also, when you say that “There’s already well-established Federal law on this issue,” that’s actually misleading, because it implies that the law already covers the making of fake medals. But you’ve just acknowledged that the law covers no such thing, so there is, in fact, not already “well-established federal law” (at least, not in Title 18) on the issue of making fake medals.
As far as I can tell, only the provisions relating to lying about the medals have been struck down, not the ones relating to unauthorized manufacture.
Well, regardless of what you understood it to say, I can assure you that I was saying we should make it illegal, as the last phrase “not that it’s already illegal” should have made clear.
Actually, that last phrase simply finished off what was a rather confused and confusing sentence that really made very little sense.
And i still think your argument misrepresents the issue, because you pretend that a law making it illegal to counterfeit medals would be legally and philosophically equivalent to the law making it illegal to counterfeit obligations and securities.
I’m reading through the decision now, and it does indeed seem that manufacture is an issue not addressed in the decision.
However, assuming the First Amendment does indeed protect as free speech the wearing of a medal that someone didn’t earn, is there any other thing or device which the Constitution protects the use of, but that law forbids the manufacture of? That’s an open question. It seems more than a bit bizarre to say that one has the First Amendment right to wear an unearned Purple Heart, but that there would be no constitutional protection for manufacturing a Purple Heart to be worn in furtherance of one’s First Amendment rights.
I would think that if something is illegal to use, it would also be illegal to manufacture – bombs, fake dollar bills, etc. Is there something for which the use is constitutionally protected, but manufacture outlawed?
ETA: By the way, I think the main line of the Court’s reasoning, that if we criminalize the wearing of unearned military medals, then we could criminalize lying on match.com or Facebook, is just stupid. It sounds to me like one of those dumb, desperate slippery slope arguments that would be ridiculed here in GD.
Of course: legal tender. You can lie about having cash, but you can’t make your own.
Wait – are you thinking that the court’s ruling allows Alvarez to lie about having a medal, but does not allow him to wear a medal?
As I read it, if Mr. Alvarez wanted to stroll down the street wearing a Medal of Honor, that’s part of his First Amendment rights.
I would say the wearing of a medal is analogous to USING cash, not just lying about having it.
John Kerry was still a Navy reservist at the time, and so was not really allowed under the UCMJ to throw his medals back at the capitol.
This was an act of civil disobedience - and part of that entails dealing with consequences from the action if that comes down. I have no particular problem with that, and I’m sure Kerry was willing to deal with it at the time as well. As it stood, the military didn’t have any stomach in prosecuting a minor issue with a nondrilling reservist, and rightly so.
I have no problem with UCMJ rules about that - constitutional rights are different in the military. But to have civilians throwing their medals away criminalized strikes me as wrong.
Yes, that was my impression.