Is hate free speech? Does the First Amendment protect something as offensive as burning a cross? The Supreme Court will decide.

• Author: Perez-Pena, Richard
• Position: National

Richars J. Elliott was annoyed. At a party in Virginia Beach, Virginia, 18-year-old Elliott told the other teens gathered there that he wanted to "get back" at his new neighbor, James S. Jubilee. Jubilee had been complaining about the noise from the Elliott family's backyard shooting range. Jubilee, who is black, and his wife, Susan, who is white, had recently moved to the area from Los Angeles, in an effort to get away from crime.

Elliott suggested burning a cross in Jubilee's yard.

He and Jonathan O'Mara, 18, and David Targee, the 17-year-old host of the party, all whites, made a wooden cross, four feet tall, then hopped into Targee's pickup truck and drove to the Jubilee home. O'Mara tried to set the cross on fire with lighter fluid, but only charred it before leaving it on the lawn for Jubilee to find the next morning.

LET THE COURT DECIDE

The incident has turned into a profound question of free speech that the U.S. Supreme Court, the nation's highest legal authority, will decide in its term beginning Oct. 7. It is just one of about 80 cases the Court will resolve this year, tackling tough issues ranging from gun rights to what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

In the Virginia case, the Court will consider whether the Constitution protects cross-burning as a form of free speech, like flag-burning. The Court will hear arguments in the case, with its echoes of an uglier era in American race relations, and will render its decision sometime before the end of June.

This is actually two cases in one, because the case of the three teenagers has been combined with that of a Ku Klux Klan leader who burned a 25-foot cross at a Klan rally in Carroll County, Virginia, a few months later. The Klan leader, Barry E. Black, was tined $2,500, but not sentenced to jail. Elliott and O'Mara were sentenced to 90 days in jail and fined $2,500, and Targee was sentenced to 30 days.

It might have ended there, but the American Civil Liberties Union took the case, and hired a noted black lawyer, David P. Baugh, to represent the Klan leader and appeal his conviction. "The Constitution protects free speech for everybody, people you like and people you don't like," Baugh says. "If you have faith in a principle, you have to adhere to it even when it bothers you. As individuals, we face tests like that every day in our lives, and so does our democracy."

In an earlier cross-burning case, the Supreme Court overturned a St. Paul, Minnesota, ordinance that...