Charlie Kratovil, founder and editor of New Brunswick Today, is at the center of a case that tests a New Jersey law barring the publication of some public officials’ addresses. (Dana DiFilippo | New Jersey Monitor)
Attorneys for press advocates and for New Brunswick met in front of the New Jersey Supreme Court Monday as the justices decide whether a state law meant to shield the addresses of some public officials can bar a reporter from publishing information gleaned through documents provided by the government.
Charlie Kratovil, editor of New Brunswick Today, is seeking to enjoin the city’s officials from using the statute — called Daniel’s Law — to limit his reporting, saying their invocation of the law to warn of civil and criminal penalties had violated First Amendment protections on free speech.
“This case asks a simple question about whether the government can provide information to a reporter, then later attempt to punish the reporter for reporting that same information in a story about an issue of public concern. It cannot,” said attorney Alexander Shalom, who represented Kratovil.
Officials had sought to bar Kratovil from publishing the address of New Brunswick’s then-police director, Anthony Caputo, who lived roughly two hours away in Cape May and seldom attended city council and other governmental meetings, after Kratovil published a story noting his residence in New Jersey’s southernmost county. Kratovil had obtained Caputo’s address through an Open Public Records Act request.
Kratovil has argued a letter the city sent him warning him about potential penalties if he published the address amounts to an unconstitutional prior restraint. The city has charged the state’s interest in protecting officials from violence justified restraints on speech.
Susan O’Connor, the city’s attorney, argued Caputo’s exact address is not information the public needs.
“The street number and the street name are not a matter of public importance and therefore does not add anything to the free and robust debate on the public issues that plaintiff is espousing,” she said. “His request to bootstrap non-relevant personal information should not be tolerated by this court.”
Lower courts have ruled Daniel’s Law, named for the son of U.S. District Court Judge Esther Salas, who was killed during an assassination attempt targeting Salas, is narrowly tailored enough to pass constitutional muster. The law bars publication of the addresses of judges and some law enforcement and other public officials.
On Monday, Kratovil’s arguments centered around legal tests spawned by a 1989 U.S. Supreme Court decision called Florida Star v. B.J.F., which centered around a rape victim’s complaint that the Florida Star newspaper printed her name after a reporter found it in a police report. The court’s ruling invalidated a Florida law that criminalized the release of rape victims’ names by news media.
Shalom argued that precedent the U.S. Supreme Court set in the case and others requires governments to find less restrictive ways to limit the spread of information when that information comes from the government to begin with.
“Florida Star is very clear about this: When the government … gives you the information, courts must make the assumption that they had a better way to prevent publication other than subsequent criminalization or civil penalty,” Shalom told the state Supreme Court Monday. “They didn’t.”
If a link between the barred content is at least as close as it was in Florida Star — where justices found a rape victim’s name was sufficiently related to crime writ large — precedent bars prior restraint, he said.
Numerous parties have intervened in the Kratovil case as friends of the court. An attorney for New Jersey, which argued in favor of New Brunswick, said Kratovil would fail the test established in Florida Star from the outset because while Caputo’s lengthy commute to his former job was a matter of public interest, the precise length of that commute was not.
“The point is he lives about two hours away, and the town is relevant to that. Nobody’s disputed that in this case, but that’s, I think, all you need to say,” said Deputy Solicitor General Michael Zuckerman.
Shalom and attorney Frank Corrado, who argued on behalf of press groups who joined the case to support Kratovil, said that reading would turn judges into “super editors” by allowing them veto power over news copy.
“What the courts have done here, both the lower court and the affirmance by the Appellate Division, is say, ‘certain information is necessary to a story,’ and more importantly, ‘certain information is not necessary to a story,’” Corrado said. “That’s an edit of the story by any definition.”
But Zuckerman argued judges are well versed in making such decisions and would have to do no more than analyze the First Amendment and determine how it applies to a given argument, as is common in First Amendment cases.
“Those are difficult judgment calls to make, but they’re questions of law,” he said. “The question is what does the First Amendment say, how does it apply, is this a matter of public concern or not — and there’s just no way to do that analysis without thinking about ‘what is this article about.’”
Chief Justice Stuart Rabner, who advocated for the passage of Daniel’s Law, and Justices Douglas Fasciale and John Jay Hoffman did not participate in oral arguments. Appellate Division Judge Jack Sabatino, who temporarily sat on the Supreme Court in 2022 and 2023, joined the other justices in hearing the case.
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