Woman Wins Manson-Shirt Case Appeal

Friday, January 5th 2001, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) â€” A woman who strolled a town festival in a Marilyn Manson T-shirt, then was convicted of harassment because of its lewd language, won a reversal Friday from the Kentucky Court of Appeals.

A three-judge panel said it was throwing out the conviction without getting into the case's free-speech issues.

The law defines harassment as a course of conduct intended to alarm or seriously annoy others. ``Wearing a T-shirt is not a course of conduct,'' the judges said in their unanimous ruling.

``A single act that annoys another person simply is not harassment as defined by the statute,'' the opinion said.

Venus Starlett Dust Morgan made headlines in 1998 when police cited her at Tater Days, an annual spring festival at Benton. Authorities said women with young children complained about Morgan's shirt, which bore a lyric from a song by the shock-rock Manson band.

Morgan, then a 20-year-old college student, was convicted of harassment in a non-jury trial. She was fined $250, plus $72 in court costs. Morgan likened the court session to ``a Salem witch trial. ... It was me getting burned at the stake.''

She lost her first appeal to Marshall Circuit Court, where a judge said the shirt was not constitutionally protected free speech.

But the Court of Appeals said the wearing of a T-shirt, even with ``admittedly offensive language,'' was not within the conduct intended to be prohibited under the harassment statute.

Writing for the court, Judge Tom Emberton said the law prohibits a ``course of conduct'' or ``repeated acts'' intended to harass, annoy or alarm.

``By wearing the T-shirt, Venus knew she would be seen, and ... it may well be inferred that she intended for viewers to be annoyed,'' Emberton's opinion said. But the law ``clearly requires more than a simple expression of dislike by ... the public for the conduct of another person,'' it said.