## Facts

- A high school student in Albany County, New York, anonymously created a publicly accessible Facebook page posting sexual information and photographs of classmates and other adolescents.
- The posts included names, pictures, and descriptions of alleged sexual activities.
- Albany County Local Law No. 11 of 2010 criminalized sending electronic communications with intent to “harass, annoy, threaten, abuse, taunt, intimidate, torment, humiliate, or otherwise inflict significant emotional harm.”
- The ordinance also prohibited disseminating “private, personal, false, or sexual information” about another person with “no legitimate private, personal, or public purpose.”
- The student moved to dismiss on First Amendment grounds; the trial court denied the motion, and he pleaded guilty while preserving the constitutional challenge.
- The county court affirmed, sustaining the law “insofar as” it prohibited cyberbullying of children.
- The New York Court of Appeals granted review.

## Issues

1. Whether Albany County’s cyberbullying ordinance is facially invalid under the First Amendment because it criminalizes a substantial amount of protected speech.
2. Whether unconstitutional applications or language could be cured through narrowing construction or severability, leaving a constitutional core (including as applied to minors).

## Decision

- The Court of Appeals reversed the county court and dismissed the accusatory instrument.
- The court held the ordinance facially unconstitutional for substantial overbreadth because it criminalized a wide range of protected expression beyond cyberbullying.
- The court declined to adopt a narrowing construction or sever offending terms because doing so would require judicial rewriting rather than interpretation.

## Legal Principles

- A speech-regulating law is facially invalid for overbreadth when it prohibits a substantial amount of protected expression relative to its legitimate sweep.
- The First Amendment does not permit criminal punishment of speech merely because it is annoying, humiliating, or embarrassing, absent a recognized unprotected category.
- Content-based restrictions on speech are subject to strict scrutiny and must be narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest.
- Courts may adopt reasonable limiting constructions to avoid constitutional defects but may not effectively redraft a statute; severability is improper when excision would require constructing a materially new law.

## Conclusion

New York’s highest court struck down Albany County’s cyberbullying ordinance as facially overbroad because its broad, content-based prohibitions swept far beyond unprotected speech and could not be cured without impermissible judicial rewriting.


People v. Marquan M., 19 N.E.3d 480 (N.Y. 2014)