i didn't know about griswold vs connecticut

very interesting (link to the actual case in the article below from media matters )

Hume falsely claimed that "no one" had been prosecuted under Connecticut anti-contraceptive law in Griswold case; law prof Kmiec agreedOn the October 24 edition of Fox News' Special Report, host Brit Hume falsely claimed that "no one was prosecuting" those who violated a Connecticut law that prohibited the use or provision of contraceptives, which was overturned in the U.S. Supreme Court's 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut -- the case that established the constitutional right to privacy. In fact, the case involved the operators of a New Haven, Connecticut, birth control clinic who had been arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and fined under the state law. Douglas W. Kmiec, a constitutional law professor at Pepperdine University, concurred with Hume's false assertion, responding, "That's right."
Kmiec also agreed with Hume's misleading assertion that "some critics" of Griswold believed the Connecticut law could not be enforced "without invading people's bedrooms, which hadn't happened." However, Kmiec added that the law was "a criminal statute, and they [the clinic's operators] could have been subject to fine and imprisonment." Without noting that the appellants had, in fact, been fined $100 for their role as "accessories" in helping a married couple violate the contraception ban, Kmiec went on to insist that the law "was largely a statute that went unenforced, and it was largely unenforceable." Kmiec then said:
KMIEC: The court could have taken a very judicially restrained posture and simply said that this is one of those statutes that is arbitrary, and unenforceable, and beyond the scope of the law. But instead, Justice William O. Douglas, writing for the majority of the court, created a phrase, "penumbras, formed by emanations" from the text of other provisions of the Constitution.
But while it is true that Connecticut's law went largely unenforced with regard to individual contraceptive use and distribution by private doctors, as a result of police shutting down a clinic in 1939, under authority of the contraception law, some Connecticut residents had to go out of state in order to obtain contraception. Citing a 1990 Iowa Law Review article by Mary Dudziak, then a professor at the University of Iowa, University of Southern California law professor David B. Cruz noted in a Summer 2000 article in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review that the law had been used to prosecute a birth control clinic's operators in 1939. According to a June 7, 1985, Associated Press article, from the time the police shut down the clinic in 1939 until the 1965 Griswold ruling, "Planned Parenthood supporters would arrange for carloads of women to go to out-of-state clinics."
According to a June 12, 1995, Connecticut Law Review article, over the next two decades, Planned Parenthood repeatedly attempted to have the Connecticut law repealed by the state legislature or overturned by the courts. In 1961, Estelle Griswold, then the executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and C. Lee Buxton, a doctor at Yale Medical School, were arrested shortly after opening a birth control clinic in New Haven. City University of New York law professor William C. Heffernan noted in a Fall 1995 Suffolk University Law Review article that Griswold and Buxton "welcomed the prosecution" as a chance to overturn the law:
Indeed, Griswold and Buxton actively sought such a prosecution to secure judicial review of the statute's constitutionality. In November 1961, Griswold held a New Haven news conference announcing that Planned Parenthood would engage in activities that the statute was designed to prohibit. She announced that her organization would open a clinic that would dispense birth control devices to married couples. When police officers raided the clinic shortly after its opening, Griswold actually offered to help find former patients who would testify against her in court.
One of those patients, the Rev. Joan Forsberg, was quoted in the June 7, 1985, AP article as saying: "If I went to a private physician with high fees, I could have gotten birth control, but I was a married woman of low income, and I couldn't afford that."...........