4^th Circuit Affirms Dismissal of Legal Challenge to South Carolina’s Restriction on Media Access to Prisoners

On December 13, 2024, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed the August, 2024 dis­missal of a law­suit that sought to chal­lenge, on First Amendment grounds, a South Carolina Department of Corrections’ (SCDC) pol­i­cy that pro­hibits the pub­li­ca­tion of inter­views between pris­on­ers and the media or mem­bers of the pub­lic. In its deci­sion, the Fourth Circuit cit­ed to Houchins v. KQED, a 1978 Supreme Court rul­ing which held that the U.S. Constitution does not man­date ​“a right of access to…sources of infor­ma­tion with­in the government’s con­trol,” includ­ing those incar­cer­at­ed. The Fourth Circuit rea­soned that ​“the media have no spe­cial right of access to the [prison] dif­fer­ent from or greater than that accord­ed the public generally.”

In its chal­lenge, the ACLU of South Carolina (ACLU-SC) char­ac­ter­izes the prison media-access pol­i­cy as ​“among the most restric­tive of any state in the U.S.” It also crit­i­cizes the pol­i­cy for essen­tial­ly ​“tak[ing] the posi­tion that incar­cer­at­ed peo­ple ​‘lose the priv­i­lege of speak­ing to the news media when they enter SCDC.’” The SCDC’s total ban on media inter­views blocked the ACLU-SC from pub­lish­ing two inter­views with clients — Sofia Cano and Marion Bowman Jr. — dis­cussing their mal­treat­ment while in SCDC cus­tody. In their ini­tial fil­ings, attor­neys for Mr. Bowman wrote:

Mr. Bowman was con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death in 2002 for the 2001 shoot­ing death of Kandee Martin. In July 2024, the South Carolina Supreme Court found that all three of the state’s meth­ods of exe­cu­tion — lethal injec­tion, elec­tro­cu­tion, and fir­ing squad — are con­sti­tu­tion­al. This rul­ing prompt­ed the resump­tion of exe­cu­tions in South Carolina for the first time since 2011. Because Mr. Bowman has exhaust­ed all of his appeals, and could be sched­uled for exe­cu­tion, the ACLU argues that pub­lish­ing his inter­view is a nec­es­sary part of his clemen­cy request, intend­ed ​“to increase polit­i­cal pres­sure in favor of clemen­cy, to shed light on the impro­pri­ety of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, and to inform the pub­lic about the inhu­mane treat­ment endured by peo­ple incar­cer­at­ed at SCDC.” Mr. Bowman will ask Governor Henry McMaster to con­sid­er his clemen­cy request but nei­ther Gov. McMaster nor any oth­er South Carolina gov­er­nor in the mod­ern era of the death penal­ty has grant­ed clemen­cy to a death-sentenced prisoner.