Griswold V Connecticut Essay Research Paper The

Griswold V. Connecticut Essay, Research Paper

The United States is considered by many to be one of the most powerful nations in

the world. It has accepted some of the more liberal ideas pertaining to it s citizens rights

that other countries have not acknowledged. These other countries have a fear that a

good deal of governmental power will be lost if too much freedom is bestowed upon it s

citizens. However, the American government still manages to hold a strong united nation

with citizens, who for the most part, believe that they are free to follow the doctrine of

Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. One example of these rights is the right to

free speech, allowed to American citizens through the First Amendment. Other rights

include the right to a public criminal trial by jury ( Sixth Amendment) and the substantive

due process, which is generally considered a right to privacy ( the Fifth Amendment and

also the Fourteenth Amendment).

Unfortunately the government of America does have to limit the actions of it s

citizens in order to provide a logical system of moral following nation s people. The

citizens of America, under federalist regime, are legally obliged to follow the contents of

both the Constitution and also the laws of the specific states in which they reside. Every

state in America uses the Constitution as a fundamental basis for establishing the laws to

which it ( the specific state) believes it s statesmen wish to live under. But sometimes the

meaning of the Constitution is not crystal clear on the surface level, such as the dealing

with the substantive due process which (in the Fourteenth Amendment) states No state

shall make or enforce any law which shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property

without due process of law. But what is due process of law ? and who is responsible for

defining it? The possible misinterpretation of the Constitution could lead, and has led to

the establishment of unjust laws in some states.

In the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling was

called forth to determine if the state of Connecticut could involve itself in what the

appellants called private affairs. The conditions of Connecticut law, prior to 1965,

stated:

Any person who uses any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing

conception shall be fined not less than fifty dollars or imprisoned not less than sixty days nor

more than one year or be both fined and imprisoned. ( sited from Griswold v. Connecticut

Supreme Court case) .

And it was under these terms that Estelle T. Griswold, who was the Executive Director of

the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut ( PPLC), and C. Lee Buxton, a Medical

Director staffed by the League to provide information, were found guilty in the 1962

nonjury court case of The State of Connecticut v. Estelle T. Griswold and C. Lee

Buxton. They were found guilty under terms of the state of Connecticut for distributing

both advice and articles considered illegal by the state law. They were both fined a sum of

one hundred dollars against the claim that the accessory statute as so applied violated the

Fourteenth Amendment, ( form court case).

Though the law may sound unwise, or even asinine, as Mr. Justice Stewart put

it, the Justices had a hard time trying to relate a part of the Constitution which is in direct

contradiction of the Connecticut statute. Darien A. McWhirter and Jon D. Bible state in

the book Privacy as a Constitutional Right [Connecticut s law] basically said that people

who engaged in heterosexual conduct had to leave to God (and the state) the question of

whether children would be the result of that conduct, (McWHIRTER/BIBLE 96). This

governmental policy of the state of Connecticut may appear absurd and unjust, but in what

ways was it unconstitutional?

Possibly the motives for having the Connecticut Statute, which was originally

established in 1879, could be seen in a majority of Roman Catholic followers living in

Connecticut. It is noted in Liberty and Sexuality that one New Haven [news] paper,

predicting that Griswold and Buxton will win overwhelmingly, had emphasized that Joe

Clark [one of the Justices seated on the Supreme Court case] was a young man in his

early thirties with no experience before the Supreme Court, (pg. 239). Such prejudices in

Connecticut local media possibly display a bitter Roman Catholic attitude towards the case

in general.

Thomas Emerson, who represented the appellants in Supreme Court argued It s a

religious principle that s being enacted into law, that it is immoral to use contraceptives

even within the marriage relation…. there is no objective basis for the statutes, (LIBERTY 238)

in argument to why the Connecticut statute was not rational or just. After the oral

argument had been presented by Thomas Emerson, Justice Stewart questioned what

Justice Clark th

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