Facts
- Connecticut criminalized the use of any drug, medicinal article, or instrument to prevent conception and imposed fines or imprisonment.
- Connecticut separately allowed punishment of anyone who assisted, abetted, counseled, or caused another to commit an offense as if a principal.
- Estelle T. Griswold (Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut) and Dr. C. Lee Buxton operated a New Haven clinic that provided married couples contraceptive counseling, examinations, and prescriptions.
- The State charged Griswold and Buxton as accessories for assisting married persons in the use of contraceptives.
- Both defendants were convicted and fined $100 each.
- Connecticut appellate courts affirmed the convictions, and the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal.
Issues
- Whether the defendants had standing to assert constitutional rights of married couples to whom they provided medical and counseling services.
- Whether Connecticut’s prohibition on contraceptive use, as enforced through accessory liability for providing advice and prescriptions to married couples, violated the Constitution by intruding on marital privacy.
Decision
- The Supreme Court reversed the judgment affirming the convictions.
- The Court held the defendants had standing to assert the rights of married couples with whom they had a professional relationship and whom they served in conduct deemed criminal.
- The Court held Connecticut’s ban on contraceptive use, as applied to married couples and those assisting them, violated a constitutional right of marital privacy.
- The Court reasoned that several Bill of Rights guarantees create “zones of privacy” that protect the marital relationship from governmental intrusion.
- Concurring Justices agreed with reversal but relied on different rationales, including the Ninth Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment liberty (substantive due process), and lack of a rational relation to legitimate state objectives as applied to married couples.
- Dissents argued that no textual constitutional provision created a general right of privacy authorizing invalidation of the statute.
Legal Principles
- A criminal defendant prosecuted for aiding conduct may, in appropriate circumstances, assert that the underlying conduct cannot constitutionally be made a crime when closely tied to the defendant’s professional relationship with the affected persons.
- The Constitution protects a right of marital privacy against unwarranted governmental intrusion, including into decisions about use of contraception within marriage.
- Specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights, applied against the States through the Fourteenth Amendment, may imply protected privacy interests in intimate family and marital matters.
- The Ninth Amendment supports the proposition that not all fundamental rights are enumerated in the Constitution.
Conclusion
The Court invalidated Connecticut’s contraception ban as an unconstitutional intrusion into marital privacy and permitted providers prosecuted as accessories to assert the constitutional rights of married couples they served.