## Facts

- A 17-year-old girl in Georgia was raped and killed; the case received substantial news coverage.
- Georgia had a statute making it a misdemeanor to publish or broadcast the name or identity of a rape victim.
- A television reporter for a station owned by Cox Broadcasting obtained copies of indictments from the clerk’s office during a court recess.
- The indictments were official court records available for public inspection and included the victim’s full name.
- The reporter broadcast the victim’s name in a televised report about the defendants’ sentencing.
- The victim’s father sued the broadcaster and reporter, alleging invasion of privacy and violation of the Georgia statute.
- A Georgia trial court granted summary judgment for the father on liability and rejected First and Fourteenth Amendment defenses.
- The Supreme Court of Georgia held the statute did not itself create a civil action but allowed a common-law privacy claim and concluded the First and Fourteenth Amendments did not bar recovery, treating the statute as a declaration that a victim’s name was not a matter of public concern.

## Issues

1. Whether the Supreme Court had appellate jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1257(2) despite unresolved state-court proceedings on damages, given the state court’s resolution of the federal constitutional issue.
2. Whether the First and Fourteenth Amendments allow a state to impose civil or criminal liability on the press for publishing a rape victim’s name truthfully obtained from public judicial records open to public inspection.

## Decision

- The Court held it had jurisdiction because the state court’s ruling was final as to the federal constitutional question and the statute’s constitutionality was drawn in question.
- The Court held that the First and Fourteenth Amendments prohibit a state from imposing sanctions for publishing truthful information contained in official court records open to public inspection.
- The Court ruled that Georgia could not use either its statute or a common-law privacy theory to penalize the broadcast of the victim’s name taken from those public records.
- A dissent argued the state judgment was not final for purposes of Supreme Court review.

## Legal Principles

- For Supreme Court review under 28 U.S.C. § 1257, finality is assessed pragmatically; a state judgment may be reviewable when it conclusively resolves the federal issue and is not subject to further state-court reconsideration.
- Once a state makes information part of an official judicial record open to the public, the First and Fourteenth Amendments generally bar civil or criminal punishment for truthful publication of that information by the press.
- Privacy interests, though significant, do not justify imposing liability for truthful reporting of information the government itself has placed in public court files; protection must come from controlling disclosure at the record-creation and access stages rather than punishing publication.

## Conclusion

The Court reversed the state-court outcome on the federal issue, holding that Georgia could not impose civil or criminal liability for broadcasting a rape victim’s name that was truthfully obtained from publicly available court records, and it confirmed a pragmatic approach to finality for Supreme Court jurisdiction when a state decision conclusively resolves a constitutional question affecting press freedom.


Cox Broad. Corp. v. Cohn, 420 U.S. 469 (1975)