Arizona Supreme Court Rules Letter to Editor Still Covered by First Amendment

The Arizona Supreme Court held that the First Amendment barred a tort suit against the Tucson Citizen arising from the newspaper’s pub­lication of a controversial letter to the editor about the war in Iraq.  In Citizen Publishing Co. v. Miller, the newspaper was sued for intentional infliction of emotional distress after it published a letter that referenced Machiavelli and suggested executing innocent Muslims to deter fur­ther violence in Iraq. 

The court’s unanimous opinion held that the letter did not fall “within one of the well-recognized narrow excep­tions to the general rule of First Amendment protection for political speech,” and therefore the news­paper “cannot be held liable under Arizona tort law for publishing this letter.”  The Court emphasized the case’s significance by accepting jurisdiction over an interlocutory special action challenging the de­nial of a motion to dismiss, which the court noted it would do only “rarely.”

The Tucson Citizen is a Tucson-based newspaper that covers general news.