Opinion ID: 1222574
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause/Void-for-vagueness

Text: In their complaint, Plaintiffs raised both a facial and as-applied vagueness challenge. The district court concluded that the Ordinance was not vague, but did not specify whether it was addressing the facial or as-applied challenge. Plaintiffs also do not clearly specify which kind of challenge they are pursuing on appeal. We review de novo the district court's conclusion that the Ordinance was not unconstitutionally vague. United States v. Duran, 596 F.3d 1283, 1290 (11th Cir.2010). Because the district court decided this claim on summary judgment, we take the evidence before the district court at that time in the light most favorable to Plaintiffs. Chapman v. AI Transport, 229 F.3d 1012, 1026-27 (11th Cir.2000) (en banc); Schwarz v. City of Treasure Island, 544 F.3d 1201, 1211 (11th Cir.2008). A law is unconstitutionally vague only if it fails to provide a person of ordinary intelligence fair notice of what is prohibited, or is so standardless that it authorizes or encourages seriously discriminatory enforcement. United States v. Williams, 553 U.S. 285, 128 S.Ct. 1830, 1845, 170 L.Ed.2d 650 (2008). Language has limits and precision is rarely possible. An ordinance cannot be expected to address specifically every set of potential facts; a law need not be a book in length. When passing on the vagueness of a law, we must remember that, because we are [c]ondemned to the use of words, we can never expect mathematical certainty from our language. Grayned v. City of Rockford, 408 U.S. 104, 92 S.Ct. 2294, 2300, 33 L.Ed.2d 222 (1972). With that in mind, we turn first to Plaintiffs' as-applied challenge. The Ordinance makes it unlawful to knowingly sponsor, conduct, or participate in the distribution or service of food at a large group feeding at a park. A large group feeding is defined as an event intended to attract, attracting, or likely to attract twenty-five (25) or more people. Plaintiffs contend that applying the Ordinance to an event that is likely to attract twenty-five (25) or more people fails to give fair notice and encourages discriminatory enforcement. Plaintiffs produced some evidence that for them to estimate how many people will show up at a food-sharing event is difficult. Even if the Plaintiffs are correct that the likely provision fails to provide fair notice on its own, the potential vaguenessif anyis cured by the Ordinance's knowingly scienter requirement. See Hill v. Colorado, 530 U.S. 703, 120 S.Ct. 2480, 2498, 147 L.Ed.2d 597 (2000); United States v. Starks, 157 F.3d 833, 839-40 (11th Cir.1998). Under Florida's rules of statutory interpretation applicable to criminal laws, the Ordinance provides no liability for a sponsor or participant that is surprised in good faith about the number of feeding participants at an event: a defendant's knowledge that the event is likelythat is, may be reasonably expected to happento attract twenty-five or more people is an essential element of the offense. See Polite v. State, 973 So.2d 1107, 1111-13 (Fla.2007) (interpreting a criminal law applicable to [w]hoever knowingly and willfully resists, obstructs, or opposes any officer and concluding that knowledge of the officer's status is an essential element of the offense). Put differently, the Ordinance requires the City to prove to the pertinent fact finder in a trial that the defendant knew that it was probable that an event would attract twenty-five people or more. That knowledge may sometimes be hard for the City to prove, but that difficulty does not make the Ordinance unconstitutionally vague. Plaintiffs contend that two other provisions of the Ordinance encourage, and have resulted in, arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement. Their first objection is to applying the Ordinance to the park's adjacent sidewalks and rights-of-way. In their complaint, Plaintiffs alleged that they conducted feedings in areas close to, but not adjacent to, parks on at least six occasions. Plaintiffs produced some evidence that on one of these occasions, when they were serving food from a parking space approximately one block away from Lake Eola Park, a police officer informed them that they were in violation of the Ordinance because they were adjacent to the park. In most cases, the plain meaning of the word adjacent leaves no doubt about which areas are covered by the Ordinance. See 1 Oxford English Dictionary 155 (2d ed.1989) (defining adjacent as [l]ying near or close (to); adjoining; contiguous, bordering); The Random House Dictionary of the English Language 25 (2d ed.1987) (defining adjacent as lying near, close, or contiguous; adjoining; neighboring). We suppose that, in a situation like the one described by Plaintiffs, it might be debatable whether an area one block away from a park is adjacent to the park (although we question whether the Ordinance goes so far). But that a police officer may have some difficulty applying the Ordinance on the margins does not nearly establish that the Ordinance delegates to the officers a virtually unrestrained power to arrest and charge persons with a violation. Kolender v. Lawson, 461 U.S. 352, 103 S.Ct. 1855, 1860, 75 L.Ed.2d 903 (1983) (quoting Lewis v. City of New Orleans, 415 U.S. 130, 94 S.Ct. 970, 973, 39 L.Ed.2d 214 (1974) (Powell, J., concurring)). An ordinance's constitutionality does not hang on whether every police officer would understand the ordinance in the same way in every conceivable factual circumstance. Absolute clarity is too much to expect from the drafters of laws, and perfect knowledge of the fullest reach of the laws is too much to expect of even the most reasonable police officers. The term adjacent provides a sufficiently clear and definite standard to police officers and prosecutors. See Grayned v. City of Rockford, 408 U.S. 104, 92 S.Ct. 2294, 2300-01, 33 L.Ed.2d 222 (1972) (adjacent to school not impermissibly vague); Cox v. Louisiana, 379 U.S. 559, 85 S.Ct. 476, 482-83, 13 L.Ed.2d 487 (1965) (near the courthouse not impermissibly vague). Plaintiffs second objectionalso anecdotally basedmust suffer a similar fate. Plaintiffs produced some evidence that, on at least one occasion, police seemed to operate with the view that the Ordinance was inapplicable if there was a unique sponsor for every twenty-five people participating in an event. The City did not operate under this interpretation, however, when it later arrested Plaintiff Montanez for noncompliance with the Ordinance. [14] The Ordinance makes it unlawful to sponsor, conduct, or participate in a large group feeding without a permit; and it defines a large group feeding as an event attracting twenty-five or more people. Under the plain language of the Ordinance, therefore, the number of sponsors per event is not important. Briefly stated, as long as a sponsor conducts a separate event and fewer than twenty-five people participate in that particular feeding event, the Ordinance is not triggered. The plain language of the Ordinance does not prohibit more than one event from occurring at the same time in a park. For us, this point is the important one about these historic-fact-based arguments: that an ordinance may have been occasionally misinterpreted or misunderstood by a few police officers or that different officers had different interpretations does not render the ordinance unconstitutionally vague. Laws are not constitutionally infirm simply because a particular police officer's subjective opinion about the law turns out to be incorrect. See Joel v. City of Orlando, 232 F.3d 1353, 1360 (11th Cir.2000) (We do not find the evidence which Joel submitted indicating that the ordinance is subject to varying interpretations by City police officers problematic.); State v. Raffield, 515 So.2d 283, 285 (Fla. 1st DCA 1987) (If the statutory language is sufficiently clear, the fact that officials place different interpretations on the statute does not make the statute void for vagueness.). Here, we suppose that in some cases it may be, in fact, difficult for enforcement officers to distinguish multiple sponsors holding simultaneous different feeding events from a single larger event with multiple sponsors: two different sets of factual circumstances with different legal consequences. The problem that [circumstance] poses is addressed, not by the doctrine of vagueness, but by the requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Williams, 128 S.Ct. at 1846. What renders a statute vague is not the possibility that it will sometimes be difficult to determine whether the incriminating fact it establishes has been proved; but rather the indeterminacy of precisely what that fact is. Id. Whether a sponsor's event had the requisite number of participants at its event to trigger the Ordinance is a pure question of fact for a given case, well within the competency of finders of fact at trial. See id. We therefore conclude that Plaintiffs have failed to demonstrate that the Ordinance is vague as applied to them. About the facial challenge, those kinds of challenges are disfavored; the general rule is that they are without merit unless a plaintiff can demonstrate that the law is unconstitutionally vague in all of its applications, Village of Hoffman Estates, 102 S.Ct. at 1191, or that the law regulates a substantial amount of conduct protected by the First Amendment, Williams, 128 S.Ct. at 1845. See also Duran, 596 F.3d at 1290. We have already concluded that the law is capable of at least one constitutional application because we have determined that it is not unconstitutionally vague as applied to Plaintiffs. We have likewise already concluded that the Ordinance does not infringe Plaintiffs' First Amendment rights. The Ordinance, on its face, does not regulate a substantial amount of conduct protected by the First Amendment. [15] Plaintiffs' facial challenge must fail.