Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

He Taped Over “Live Free or Die” and Went to Jail. His Case Still Shapes Who Can Be Forced to Speak.

A New Hampshire man was sentenced to 15 days in jail in 1975 for refusing to pay fines for covering the state motto on his license plate. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled for him in 1977. The key phrase of the law he was charged under is still on the books, and the Court keeps citing his case.

When George Maynard’s case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, New Hampshire issued license plates without its motto to the governor, the state’s members of Congress, its attorney general, the justices of its Supreme Court, its sheriffs, veterans and the chaplains of its Legislature, among others. Maynard’s plates carried the motto. When he covered it, the state prosecuted him three times in five weeks.

Maynard and his wife, Maxine, were Jehovah’s Witnesses. They found “Live Free or Die” repugnant to their moral, religious and political beliefs, and early in 1974 they began covering it on their plates. When they later sued, they owned two cars, a Toyota Corolla and a Plymouth station wagon. In May or June 1974 Maynard snipped the words “or Die” off the plates and taped over the hole and the words “Live Free.” He did it, he said, because neighborhood children kept removing the tape.

He explained himself in a sworn statement. “[B]y religious training and belief, I believe my ‘government’—Jehovah’s Kingdom—offers everlasting life,” he wrote. “It would be contrary to that belief to give up my life for the state, even if it meant living in bondage.” He also objected on political grounds: “I believe that life is more precious than freedom.”

Three charges, then jail

Maynard was cited on November 27, 1974, under the statute that made it a misdemeanor to knowingly obscure “the figures or letters on any number plate.” Two years earlier, in State v. Hoskin, the New Hampshire Supreme Court had read the word “letters” to include the motto.

He went to Lebanon District Court on December 6 without a lawyer, pleaded not guilty and explained his religious objection. The judge, the Supreme Court later wrote, “expressed sympathy for Mr. Maynard’s situation, but considered himself bound” by Hoskin. Maynard was fined $25, with the fine suspended during “good behavior.”

He was charged again on December 28 and on January 3, 1975. On January 31 the court convicted him on both. For the second offense it fined him $50, imposed a six-month sentence in the Grafton County House of Corrections and suspended it, and ordered him to pay the first $25 fine as well. The third conviction was “continued for sentence.” Maynard told the court that, as a matter of conscience, he would not pay the two fines. The court sentenced him to 15 days in jail. He served the full sentence.

On March 4, 1975, the Maynards sued in federal court in New Hampshire under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the federal civil rights law. A judge ordered a halt to further arrests and prosecutions on March 11. The state then asked for time while the Legislature considered a bill that would have made the motto optional on passenger plates. The bill failed. A three-judge federal court barred the state from arresting or prosecuting the Maynards “at any time in the future for covering over that portion of their license plates that contains the motto ‘Live Free or Die.’” New Hampshire appealed.

What New Hampshire argued, and what the Court said

Assistant Attorney General Robert V. Johnson II argued the state’s case at the Supreme Court on November 29, 1976. The attorney general on the state’s brief was David H. Souter, who later served on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1990 to 2009 and died in May 2025. Richard S. Kohn argued for the Maynards.

The state gave two reasons for the requirement. The first was identification: the chief of police of Lebanon testified that the motto made it easier to tell New Hampshire plates from similarly colored plates of other states and to spot misused plates. The second, in the Court’s summary, was that the motto “promotes appreciation of history, individualism, and state pride.”

The Court decided the case on April 20, 1977. On identification, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote, the record showed that New Hampshire passenger plates already had their own configuration, generally two letters followed by four numbers, which set them apart from other kinds of plates even without the motto. (The record also showed that 9,999 of about 325,000 passenger plates were numbers only.) Even crediting the state’s reason, Burger wrote, quoting a 1960 decision, Shelton v. Tucker, the law had to be measured against “less drastic means for achieving the same basic purpose.” On the second reason he wrote: “The State’s second claimed interest is not ideologically neutral.” Where a state’s interest “is to disseminate an ideology, no matter how acceptable to some, such interest cannot outweigh an individual’s First Amendment right to avoid becoming the courier for such message.” In a footnote he added that the state had not explained why its values were advanced by display “on private citizens’ cars but not on the cars of officials such as the Governor, Supreme Court Justices, Members of Congress, and sheriffs.”

The question, Burger wrote, was “whether the State may constitutionally require an individual to participate in the dissemination of an ideological message by displaying it on his private property in a manner and for the express purpose that it be observed and read by the public.” His answer: “We hold that the State may not do so.”

Justices William Brennan, Potter Stewart, Thurgood Marshall, Lewis Powell and John Paul Stevens joined Burger’s opinion, Brennan with the exception of one footnote. Justice Byron White joined all of it except the part approving an injunction, which he thought went further than the Court’s earlier cases allowed; Justices Harry Blackmun and William Rehnquist joined him on that point.

The dissent

Rehnquist, joined by Blackmun, would have ruled for the state on the First Amendment question. “The State has not forced appellees to ‘say’ anything,” he wrote. Drivers carried a plate “the format of which is known to all as having been prescribed by the State.” He quoted Hoskin, the 1972 New Hampshire ruling: membership in the class of drivers required to display the motto “carries no implication and is subject to no requirement that they endorse that motto or profess to adopt it as matter of belief.” The Maynards, he wrote, could put a bumper sticker on the car saying they disagreed.

He also pointed to the national motto. “I cannot imagine,” he wrote, that federal laws against defacing currency “impinge upon the First Amendment rights of an atheist” who carries money marked “In God We Trust.” The majority said in a footnote that the question was not before it, but noted that currency “is passed from hand to hand” and “need not be displayed to the public,” while an automobile “is readily associated with its operator.”

What the law says, as published in October 2026

The statute that names the motto credits it to General John Stark, who wrote it on July 31, 1809; its source note dates the designation to 1945. The plate laws have been renumbered and amended since Maynard’s case. As published in October 2026, RSA 261:176 makes covering a plate a violation with a $150 fine rather than a misdemeanor, but the phrase the Supreme Court quoted from the law he was convicted under, “the figures or letters on any number plate,” reads the same.

The 1977 judgment protected the Maynards. The principle the Court stated is not limited to them: “The First Amendment protects the right of individuals to hold a point of view different from the majority and to refuse to foster, in the way New Hampshire commands, an idea they find morally objectionable.” The case concerned the motto alone; covering the plate number was not at issue.

Where the case went

As of October 5, 2026, CourtListener, a free case-law database, listed 1,262 opinions citing Wooley v. Maynard. The Supreme Court has returned to it in cases that came out on different sides.

In Rumsfeld v. FAIR, Chief Justice John Roberts described the New Hampshire case in one line: the Court had “held unconstitutional another that required New Hampshire motorists to display the state motto — ‘Live Free or Die’ — on their license plates.” In Walker, Justice Samuel Alito, dissenting for four justices, used it as his example of a plate motorists had no choice about: “the State of New Hampshire made it a crime to cover up the words ‘Live Free or Die’ on its plates.”

Granite State Report has looked at how the state’s own laws measure against the motto. In Maynard’s case the motto itself went to the U.S. Supreme Court. New Hampshire defended it, and a Jehovah’s Witness who believed “life is more precious than freedom” won the right to cover it.

— Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. The account of Maynard’s prosecutions, the federal case and the justices’ reasoning is drawn from the opinion of the Court and the dissents in Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U.S. 705 (1977), as printed in the United States Reports. Later decisions are drawn from the opinions in the cases named. Statutes are quoted from the Revised Statutes Annotated as published by the General Court. Granite State Report is a newsroom, not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice.

Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.