Appeals court sides with Fla. corrections officials over magazine ban

TALLAHASSEE — Invoking Oscar Wilde, an appellate court brushed aside First Amendment concerns and sided with the Florida Department of Corrections in a long-running dispute about a magazine targeted at inmates.

The ruling last week by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a previous federal court decision in the case, which dragged on for more than a decade. It was filed by Prison Legal News over a publication allowed in institutions in every other state but banned by Florida corrections officials.

The magazine publisher says prison officials’ censorship is a violation of the First Amendment. But, agreeing with a 2015 decision by U.S. District Judge Mark Walker, the court found the publication poses a security threat.

“From time to time we have all followed the advice of Oscar Wilde and gotten rid of temptation by yielding to it. Yielding to the temptation to commit an act that the law forbids can lead to bad consequences, including imprisonment. Prison officials have the duty to reduce the temptation for prisoners to commit more crimes and to curtail their access to the means of committing them,” Ed Carnes, chief judge of the Atlantabased appeals court, wrote in a decision joined by judges Joel F. Dubina and Anne C. Conway.

The Florida corrections agency’s rules are “aimed at preventing fraud schemes” and other criminal activity, “but inmates continually attempt to circumvent” the measures, Carnes wrote in Thursday’s 48-page opinion.

Paul Wright, the publisher of the magazine, said he intends to appealto the U.S. Supreme Court.

“This is a prison system that routinely murders people, rapes them and brutalizes them, and they do so with impunity. They have a total disregard for the Constitution as a whole, so it should be no surprise that they have disregard for the First Amendment,” he said. “A huge part of their success in maintaining these dreadful conditions is basically keeping the media and the public unaware of what’s going on in their facilities and keeping prisoners ignorant of the rights and remedies under our legal system.”