Opinion ID: 77700
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Lollipop's Lawsuit

Text: 13 On December 10, 2003, Lollipop's brought this suit challenging the constitutionality of the zoning ordinances and of Ordinances 81-334, 02-496, and 03-375. First, Lollipop's claimed that the zoning ordinances do not offer reasonable alternative venues for adult theaters to communicate their erotic message because an insufficient number of sites are available for adult theaters. Alternatively, Lollipop's claimed that it was grandfathered in as a lawful nonconforming use under Florida law. The district judge, who also presided over the Red-Eyed Jack litigation, granted summary judgment to the City of Daytona Beach on both claims, noting that the City had made no changes to the zoning ordinances since his decision in Red-Eyed Jack II and that Lollipop's provided no evidence that warranted a departure from the earlier decision. 14 Second, Lollipop's challenged Ordinances 81-334, 02-496, and 03-375, urging that they neither further a substantial government interest nor are narrowly tailored. The district court granted final summary judgment to the City on Lollipop's narrow tailoring claim, but concluded that there was a genuine issue of material fact about whether the three nudity ordinances furthered a substantial government interest. Thereafter, at a six-day bench trial, Lollipop's presented expert testimony in an effort to cast direct doubt on the City's rationale for enacting the nudity ordinances. The experts explained at trial that they had conducted two empirical studies using data provided by the City. They concluded based on the data they examined that adult theaters in Daytona Beach had no statistically significant effect on crime rates, and that the City's evidence offered to the contrary was shoddy and meaningless. 15 The district court agreed and concluded that Lollipop's evidence cast direct doubt on the City's rationale for enacting the nudity ordinances: 16 Plaintiffs have succeeded in their attempt to cast direct doubt on the City's rationales for its ordinances. As persuasively demonstrated by Plaintiffs' expert studies, the City's pre-enactment evidence consists either of purely anecdotal evidence or opinions based on highly unreliable data. Most notably, the City's evidence lacks data which would allow for a comparison of the rate of crime occurring in and around adult entertainment establishments with the rate of crime occurring in and around similarly situated establishments. Absent the context that such a comparison might provide, the City's data is, as Plaintiffs assert, meaningless. 17 The court also determined that the additional evidence provided by the City in an effort to renew support for the ordinances was similarly flawed. The district court, therefore, held that Ordinances 81-334, 02-496, and 03-375 did not further a substantial government interest and declared that they violated the First Amendment. In fact, the district court struck all three nudity ordinances in their entirety, except for subsection 10-6(e) of the Daytona Beach Code (enacted by Ordinance 81-334) because that subsection regulates non-expressive conduct. 18 These appeals followed: Lollipop's argued that the district court had improvidently entered summary judgment for the City on its challenge to the zoning ordinances, as well as on its claim to grandfather status. The City, in turn, cross-appealed the court's determination that the three nudity ordinances were unconstitutional. Lollipop's also appealed from the grant of final summary judgment to the City on its claim that the nudity ordinances are not narrowly tailored. 15