Protectors of free speech crack down on ... free speech
3 judges: 'Expressive activities' on publicly owned Supreme Court plaza are criminal
Published: 10 hours ago
Guess who wins when someone challenges the U.S. Supreme Court’s rules concerning free speech on the plaza in front of its building?
Yeah, it’s the Supreme Court.
The ruling came from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which affirmed a ban on expressive activity such as handing out leaflets or carrying a sign on the U.S. Supreme Court plaza, the publicly owned patio leading to the steps of the court.
“If citizens cannot stand out in the open and voice their disapproval of their government, its representatives and its policies without fearing prosecution, then the First Amendment is little more than window-dressing on a store window – pretty to look at but serving little real purpose,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, the president of the Rutherford Institute.
Whitehead represented a man who contended the ban violated his constitutional rights at the place responsible for protecting those rights
“Through a series of carefully crafted legislative steps and politically expedient court rulings, government officials have managed to disembowel this fundamental freedom, rendering it with little more meaning than the right to file a lawsuit against government officials. The First Amendment has, for all intents and purposes, become an exercise in futility,” Whitehead said.
It was on Jan. 28, 2011, when Harold Hodge quietly and peacefully stood in the plaza. He was wearing a 24 inch by 36 inch sign that said “The U.S. Gov. Allows Police To Illegally Murder And Brutalize African Americans And Hispanic People.”
He was arrested.
Get Judge Andrew Napolitano’s words of advice, in “It Is Dangerous To Be Right When The Government Is Wrong.”
Even though, as Whitehead’s organization argued, the plaza is a “place where the public is allowed to gather and converse, and is in all relevant respects like a public square or park where citizens have traditionally met to express their views on matters of public interest.”
Hodge filed the lawsuit, and a district court judge struck down the law as “plainly unconstitutional on its face.”
That’s when the maneuvering apparently started, Rutherford said.
“In response, the government not only appealed that ruling, but the marshal for the Supreme Court – with the approval of Chief Justice John Roberts – issued even more strident regulations outlawing expressive activity on the grounds of the high court, including the plaza,” the report said.
Rutherford Institute attorneys have since filed a related lawsuit challenging the Supreme Court’s more strident regulations.
“Ironically, it will be the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court who will eventually be asked to decide the constitutionality of their own statute in this case, yet they have already made their views on the subject quite clear,” Whitehead said.
The opinion, written by Judge Srikanth Srinivasan for the three-judge panel, noted there have been restrictions in place there for decades, and a 1983 decision found that it was unconstitutional on the sidewalks around the Supreme Court, because there was “nothing to indicate to the public that these sidewalks are part of the Supreme Court grounds.”
The plaza, however, is different, Friday’s opinion says.
“Harold Hodge Jr. seeks to picket, leaflet and make speeches in the Supreme Court plaza, with the aim of conveying to the court and the public what he describes as ‘political messages’ about the court’s decisions. Hodge claims that the statue’s Assemblages and Display Clauses, by restricting his intended activities, violate his rights under the First Amendment. The district court, persuaded by his arguments, declared the statute unconstitutional in all its applications to the court’s plaza.
“We disagree and conclude that the Assemblages and Display Clauses may be constitutionally enforced in the plaza.”
The appellate judges used nearly 50 pages to explain how “the government can impose reasonable restrictions on speech as long as it refrains from suppressing particular viewpoints.”
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http://www.wnd.com/files/2013/06/SCSpeech-298x300.jpgThey wrote: “Hodge’s desired activities in the Supreme Court plaza – picketing, leafleting and speechmaking – lie at the core of the First Amendment’s protections. Still … the government, ‘no less than a private owner of property, has the power to preserve the property under its control for the use to which it is lawfully dedicated.’”
The opinion cited the Supreme Court’s conclusion that the plaza property is a nonpublic forum.
It said the fact that attorneys and litigants are allowed to use the plaza for public events such as news conferences and its use for “commercial or professional films relating to the court” does not make it a public area.
“It [also] is of no moment that the Supreme Court police in certain situations might opt to allow demonstrators onto the plaza for a brief period, presumably in an effort to exercise enforcement authority with responsible (and viewpoint-neutral) discretion in unique circumstances.”
For example, it noted 200 demonstrators surged up onto the plaza to protest a Missouri grand jury’s decision not to induct a police officer who fatally shot a teenager in 2014.
The demonstration went on for 15 minutes but no arrests were made.
Even so, the appeals judges ruled, “the plaza was then, and remains now, a nonpublic forum.”
Whitehead called it a “blow” to the First Amendment.
WND reported earlier on the ruling from U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who found: “The absolute prohibition of expressive activity in the statute is unreasonable, substantially overbroad, and irreconcilable with the First Amendment. The court therefore must find the statute unconstitutional and void as applied to the Supreme Court plaza.”
The justices and court managers who work at the building struck back immediately. They installed within hours a new set of restrictive “regulations” specifying what can and cannot happen on the high court property, including the plaza.
Read more at
http://www.wnd.com/2015/08/protectors-of-free-speech-crack-down-on-free-speech/#zWZigxbOO4cxtCeI.99
