Page:United States Reports 502 OCT. TERM 1991.pdf/264

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SIMON & SCHUSTER, INC. v. MEMBERS OF N. Y. STATE CRIME VICTIMS BD. Syllabus

Board’s assertion that discriminatory financial treatment is suspect only when the legislature intends to suppress certain ideas is incorrect, since this Court has long recognized that even regulations aimed at proper governmental concerns can restrict unduly the exercise of rights under the Amendment. Furthermore, the Board’s claim that the law is permissible under the Amendment because it focuses generally on an “entity” rather than specifically on the media falters, first, on semantic grounds, since any entity that enters into a contract with a convicted person to transmit that person’s speech becomes by definition a medium of communication, and, second, on constitutional grounds, since the governmental power to impose content-based financial disincentives on speech does not vary with the identity of the speaker. Accordingly, in order to justify the differential treatment imposed by the law, the State must show that its regulation is necessary to serve a compelling state interest and is narrowly drawn to achieve that end. Id., at 231. Pp. 115–118. (b) The State has a compelling interest in compensating victims from the fruits of crime. Cf. Caplin & Drysdale, Chartered v. United States, 491 U. S. 617, 629. However, contrary to the Board’s assertion, the State has little if any interest in limiting such compensation to the proceeds of the wrongdoer’s speech about the crime. The Board cannot explain why the State should have any greater interest in compensating victims from the proceeds of criminals’ “storytelling” than from any of their other assets, nor offer any justification for a distinction between this expressive activity and any other activity in connection with its interest in transferring the fruits of crime from criminals to their victims. Cf., e. g., Arkansas Writers’ Project, supra, at 231. Like the governmental entities in the latter and similar cases, the Board has taken the effect of the statute and posited that effect as the State’s interest. Pp. 118–121. (c) The New York law is not narrowly tailored to achieve the State’s objective of compensating victims from the profits of crime. The law is significantly overinclusive, since it applies to works on any subject provided that they express the author’s thoughts or recollections about his crime, however tangentially or incidentally, and since its broad definition of “person convicted of a crime” enables the Board to escrow the income of an author who admits in his work to having committed a crime, whether or not he was ever actually accused or convicted. These two provisions combine to encompass a wide range of existing and potential works that do not enable a criminal to profit from his crime while a victim remains uncompensated. Pp. 121–123. 916 F. 2d 777, reversed.