Background: The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (Google Maps). Inset: This image provided by Esther Salas shows U.S. District Judge Esther Salas, in her courtroom in Newark, N.J., March 20, 2025. (Esther Salas via AP).
A federal appeals court has affirmed that a West Virginia law designed to protect public officials after a gunman apparently used online information to find a federal judge's home and kill her son violates the First Amendment.
Daniel's Law, passed in The Mountain State after U.S. District Judge Esther Salas' son, 20-year-old Daniel Anderl, was shot to death at the judge's family home, blocked people and companies from disseminating addresses and telephone numbers of certain government officials if doing so "would expose [the official] to harassment or risk of harm to life or property."
However, unlike other states that passed similar laws, West Virginia doesn't require the protected official to ask the person or organization that shared the information to delete it or take it down before taking them to court. This, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit states in a ruling issued Tuesday, goes too far.
As a result, a former law enforcement officer's lawsuit against several "people search" companies that he said violated the law because they posted his personal information online has been tossed out.
In July 2020, Anderl was killed at his home in New Jersey, and his father was severely wounded. Authorities determined that a lawyer apparently upset with the victims' mother and wife, respectively, found Salas' home address, pretended to be a delivery man, and opened fire on them when they opened the door. He later died by suicide.
The judge decried the "free flow of information" that "allowed this sick and depraved human being" to target her and her family, and she sought a solution to keep public officials safe. Several states, as well as Congress, enacted versions of Daniel's Law; West Virginia passed its version in 2021.
However, the state's law was "distinct," the three-judge panel noted. Not only did it not require that the alleged violators be given a chance to rescind what they had done, but the alleged violator "need not know that they have disclosed" the protected person's information in order to have violated the legislation.
Invoking the law, Michael Jackson, an ex-law enforcement officer living in West Virginia, sued five "people search" companies, including Thomson Reuters, alleging that his and thousands of others' home addresses and telephone numbers were posted online. As he put it, these data collectors "exposed [him] and his peers to harassment and/or risk of harm to life or property."
The District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia, however, dismissed his complaints, saying the law restricted free speech protected by the First Amendment and did not use the "least restrictive means of serving the law's purpose."
Jackson appealed, but the circuit court affirmed the original decision.
The Fourth Circuit acknowledged that the state "was fully justified in attempting to regulate" the distribution of home addresses and telephone numbers of government officials, "but its efforts reached more broadly th[a]n necessary to accomplish the task." It added: "For that reason and only that reason, we agree with the district court that West Virginia could have regulated more narrowly to accomplish its purpose and thereby be less restrictive of what is otherwise protected speech."
The appellate court concluded by noting that the "task" of legislators and all involved "is to draw an appropriate line between protecting the dissemination of such information while, at the same time, excepting from dissemination the same information when it creates a potential for harm of specified public officials."
"Because of the high value that our Constitution and longstanding practices place on the free dissemination of information and the exercise of free speech, we draw the line with the greatest caution, requiring that governments regulate speech about the home addresses and telephone numbers of designated public officials in a manner that is the least restrictive of speech," the court added.