Texas v. Johnson

Texas v. Johnson
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued March 21, 1989 Decided June 21, 1989
Full case name	Texas v. Gregory L. Johnson
Citations	491 U.S. 397 (more) 109 S. Ct. 2533; 105 L. Ed. 2d 342; 1989 U.S. LEXIS 3115; 57 U.S.L.W. 4770
Case history
Prior	Defendant convicted, Dallas County Criminal Court; affirmed, 706 S.W.2d 120 (Tex. App. 1986); reversed and remanded for dismissal, 755 S.W.2d 92 (Tex. Crim. App. 1988); cert. granted, 488 U.S. 884 (1988).
Holding
Gregory Lee Johnson's conviction was inconsistent with the First Amendment. Any statute that criminalizes the desecration of the American flag is unconstitutional. Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed.
Court membership
Chief Justice William Rehnquist Associate Justices William J. Brennan Jr. · Byron White Thurgood Marshall · Harry Blackmun John P. Stevens · Sandra Day O'Connor Antonin Scalia · Anthony Kennedy
Case opinions
Majority	Brennan, joined by Marshall, Blackmun, Scalia, Kennedy
Concurrence	Kennedy
Dissent	Rehnquist, joined by White, O'Connor
Dissent	Stevens
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amends. I, XIV; Desecration of a Venerated Object, Tex. Penal Code § 42.09(a)(3)(1989)[a]

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Texas v. Johnson

Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (1989), is a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court held, 5–4, that burning the Flag of the United States was protected speech under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as doing so counts as symbolic speech and political speech.

In the case, activist Gregory Lee Johnson was convicted for burning an American flag during a protest outside the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas, and was fined $2,000 and sentenced to one year in jail in accordance with Texas law. Justice William Brennan wrote for the five-justice majority that Johnson's flag burning was protected under the freedom of speech, and therefore the state could not censor Johnson nor punish him for his actions.

The ruling invalidated prohibitions on desecrating the American flag, which at the time were enforced in 48 of the 50 states. The ruling was unpopular with the general public and lawmakers, with President George H. W. Bush calling flag burning "dead wrong". The ruling was challenged by Congress, which passed the Flag Protection Act later that year, making flag desecration a federal crime. The law's constitutionality was contested before the Supreme Court, which again affirmed in United States v. Eichman (1990) that flag burning was a protected form of free speech and struck down the Flag Protection Act as violating the First Amendment. In the years following the ruling, Congress several times considered the Flag Desecration Amendment, which would have amended the Constitution to make flag burning illegal, but never passed it. The issue of flag burning remained controversial decades later, and it is still used as a form of protest.^[2]

Time magazine described it as one of the best Supreme Court decisions since 1960,^[3] with legal scholars since stating about it that "Freedom of speech applies to symbolic expression, such as displaying flags, burning flags, wearing armbands, burning crosses, and the like.”^[4]

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