Griswold v. Connecticut

Facts

Griswold was Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut. Buxton, a licensed physician and a professor at the Yale Medical School, served as the League's Medical Director at its center in New Haven. The center was open and operating from November 1 to November 10, 1961. There Griswold and Buxton gave married persons information, instruction, and medical advice on the means of preventing conception. They examined the wife and prescribed a contraceptive device or material for her use. One Connecticut statute made it a crime for any person to use any drug, medicinal article or instrument to prevent conception. A second statute said that anyone who assists, abets, counsels, causes, hires or commands another to commit an offense may be prosecuted and punished as if he were the principal offender. Griswold and Buxton were arrested on November 10, 1961.

Issues

1. Do Griswold and Buxton, convicted as accessories for serving married couples, have standing to raise the constitutional rights of those married people?
2. Does Connecticut's law forbidding the use of contraceptives, as applied to married couples, violate a right of privacy that the Constitution protects?

Holding

Connecticut's ban on the use of contraceptives, as applied to married couples and those convicted of advising them, cannot stand: it reaches a relationship lying within the zone of privacy created by several fundamental constitutional guarantees, by means that sweep unnecessarily broadly. The accessory convictions were reversed.