Court Opinion

ID: 9493987
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:25:22.875091+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:08.803284
License: Public Domain

RICHARD S. ARNOLD, Circuit Judge,
joined by WOLLMAN, Chief Judge, BOWMAN, BEAM, and MORRIS SHEPPARD ARNOLD, Circuit Judges, dissenting.
Most of the Court’s opinion goes to establish the proposition that the Fargo ordinance was content neutral. I do not contest this point. It does not follow, however, that the judgment of the District Court should be reversed. There are at least two closely related alternative grounds for affirmance: that the ordinance was unconstitutionally overbroad, and that it was not narrowly tailored to a substantial state end. Because I believe that both of these grounds have merit, I respectfully dissent.
I.
The question of overbreadth turns on whether the Fargo ordinance exceeds its constitutional limits in a way that “may *750cause others not before the court to refrain from constitutionally protected speech or expression,” Broadrick v. Oklahoma, 413 U.S. 601, 612, 93 S.Ct. 2908, 37 L.Ed.2d 830 (1973), and whether its overreaching is “not only ... real, but substantial as well, judged in relation to [its] plainly legitimate sweep.” Id. at 615.
In rejecting the plaintiffs’ overbreadth claim, the Court relies on the statement of the panel in Thorburn v. Austin, 231 F.3d 1114 (8th Cir.2000), that “[pjrohibiting focused residential picketing is plainly legitimate.” This categorical statement, by itself, establishes very little. The plaintiffs are not claiming that they have a constitutional right to engage in “focused residential picketing.” They couldn’t, because the Frisby case establishes the contrary. What the plaintiffs do claim is that the Fargo ordinance under which they were arrested encompassed a range of conduct that includes substantially more than just the “focused” or “targeted” residential picketing addressed in Frisby. The most important part of the Court’s overbreadth analysis, therefore, is its assertion that “an individual engaged in an activity that is directed at a specific occupant of a dwelling falls within the legitimate sweep of the ordinance.” Ante, at 747. This amounts to a holding that picketing is “focused” or “targeted,” for Frisby purposes, whenever it is “directed at a specific occupant of a building.”
There are two significant problems with this holding. First, it is ambiguous. Because picketing is “a mixture of conduct and communication,” NLRB v. Retail Store Employees, 447 U.S. 607, 619, 100 S.Ct. 2372, 65 L.Ed.2d 377 (1980) (Stevens, J., concurring in part and concurring in result), it may be “directed at a specific occupant” in different ways. The picketers may intend the occupant to be the primary recipient of their message, or they may “direct” their picketing towards the occupant in a physical sense. The distinction makes a difference. The ordinance at issue here prohibits “picketing of dwellings,” where “picketing” is defined as
the practice of standing, marching or patrolling by one or more persons inside of, in front, or about any premises for the purpose of persuading an occupant of such premises or to protest some action, attitude, or belief.
As the plaintiffs point out, this definition extends both to protected conduct — ■ marching that is not physically “focused” on a particular residence within the meaning of Frisby — and to protected speech— messages that are intended, not only for the occupant of the house, but for the public at large. The Court rejects both of these arguments without clearly addressing either one.
This brings me to the second problem: Frisby does not say that picketers lose the shelter of the First Amendment whenever their activity is “directed at a specific occupant of a building,” whether as speech or as conduct. Its holding is narrower. In Frisby, the Supreme Court was faced with an ordinance that the two lower federal courts had held to be illegally restrictive of constitutionally protected speech. In order to avoid “constitutional difficulties,” 487 U.S. at 483, 108 S.Ct. 2495, the Court construed the ordinance as prohibiting “only focused picketing taking place solely in front of a particular residence.” Id. (emphasis mine). So construed, the ordinance was upheld. See id. at 488, 108 S.Ct. 2495 (“largely because of its narrow scope, the facial challenge to the ordinance must fail”). Although the picketing in Frisby took place in a public forum, id. at 481, 108 S.Ct. 2495, its message was forced on an unwilling recipient in the privacy of the home. The Court held that, in that respect, the activity prohibited by the ordi*751nance resembled an offensive radio broadcast, offensive matter sent through the mails, or an offensive speech blared from a sound truck, more closely than it did such protected activities as marching, see Gregory v. City of Chicago, 394 U.S. at 111, 89 S.Ct. 946 (1968), or distributing leaflets door-to-door, see Schneider v. State, 308 U.S. 147, 60 S.Ct. 146, 84 L.Ed. 155 (1939). Frisby, 487 U.S. at 485, 108 S.Ct. 2495. To the extent that the “plainly legitimate sweep” of a picketing restriction depends upon Frisby, it could extend only to picketing that takes place “solely in front of a particular residence,” id. at 483, 108 S.Ct. 2495, and functions primarily “to force speech into the home of an unwilling listener.” Id. at 485, 108 S.Ct. 2495. Any broader restriction is not “plainly - legitimate” and may be unconstitutional. The remaining question is whether the over-breadth — the range of protected speech the ordinance purports to prohibit — is substantial.
What kinds of activity does the Fargo ordinance attempt to reach? 1 In determining the breadth of the ordinance before it, the Frisby Court relied on the town attorney’s insistence that his town’s ordinance would not be enforced in a variety of probably unconstitutional ways, even though its plain language suggested that it could be. 487 U.S. at 483, 108 S.Ct. 2495. In this case, the plaintiffs’ attorney asked Fargo Police Chief Ronald Raftevold whether probable cause for arrest would exist if a person holding a picket sign walked up and down a residential street extending for several city blocks, in front of thirty houses, in order to persuade not only a specific resident of the street but also the neighborhood in general. Consider the exchange that followed:
A. In front of his dwelling was the words you used?
Q. In front of thirty dwellings. He goes back and forth in front of thirty dwellings but he only knows one person who lives in one of those dwellings and his message is very much directed at that person and to all the neighbors.
A. I would say there was probable cause that he was in violation of that ordinance.
Q. Okay. And if we expand that same fact from thirty to a hundred houses ... would that change the applicability of the ordinance?
A. I don’t believe so.
Q. Okay. And your police force was authorized to enforce it that way.
A. They were authorized to enforce it if they had probable cause to believe that that ordinance was being violated.
Q. On the hypothetical I just gave you you felt there was probable cause in those cases of thirty houses and a hundred houses so long as the picketing intent and to persuade and to *752protest one person there was present.
MR. MILLER: Asked and answered, Counsel.
JA 243^45.
Chief Raftevold’s interpretation submerges the Fargo ordinance in the very same “constitutional difficulties” that the Frisby court sought to escape by holding that the ordinance in that case extended to “picketing ... directed at a single residence,” but not to “[gjeneral marching through residential neighborhoods, or even walking a route in front of an entire block of houses .... ” Frisby, 487 U.S. at 483, 108 S.Ct. 2495. Even at the time of Frisby, Justice White’s concurring opinion suggested that without the saving grace of that interpretation, the ordinance in Frisby would have been overbroad. Id. at 491, 108 S.Ct. 2495 (White, J., concurring in judgment). Since then, the Madsen case has made clear that Frisby cannot be interpreted to justify a 300-foot “buffer zone.” See Madsen, supra, 512 U.S. at 774-75, 114 S.Ct. 2516; see also Lucero v. Trosch, 121 F.3d 591, 606 (11th Cir.1997) (striking down 200-foot residential buffer zone; stating that “the Court’s discussion [in Madsen] makes clear that its precedents support restriction of targeted picketing rather than a generalized restriction”).
In our case, the City of Fargo claims that its picketing ordinance was modeled on the one in Frisby. Its plain language casts at least as wide a net. The difference, however, is that Fargo’s ordinance cannot be saved by a narrowing construction. As it was interpreted by the leading city official charged with its enforcement, the ordinance reached substantially beyond the “plainly legitimate scope” established in Frisby. Accordingly, I would hold that it was facially overbroad.
II.
For some of the same reasons, the ordinance was not narrowly tailored to a significant governmental interest. It is true that the state’s interest in protecting residential privacy is significant. Frisby shows that. Id. at 484, 108 S.Ct. 2495. But Frisby also establishes that a complete ban on a species of communication “can be narrowly tailored ... only if each activity within the proscription’s scope is an appropriately targeted evil.” Id. at 485, 108 S.Ct. 2495. If the First Amendment permits a city to criminalize marching up and down a residential street, with persuasive intent, in front of thirty or even a hundred houses, provided only that the picket goes past one targeted residence in the course of the march, then it is hard to imagine what kind of “constitutional difficulties” the Frisby Court could have had in mind. In addition, the actual application of the ordinance here — to picketing in front of six houses, according to the Fargo police themselves — plainly went beyond Frisby’s reference to “picketing taking place solely in front of a particular residence ....” 487 U.S. at 483, 108 S.Ct. 2495. The Frisby Court’s interpretation, unavailable here, was necessary to its holding on the issue of narrow tailoring. Because we cannot adopt such an interpretation, we should reach the contrary result.
In addition to Frisby, the Court claims that Hill v. Colorado, 530 U.S. 703, 120 S.Ct. 2480, 147 L.Ed.2d 597 (2000), “strongly supports the rejection of plaintiffs’ alternative theories of constitutional imperfection in the Fargo ordinance.” This claim adds nothing to the argument. Hill dealt with a statute that marked off an eight-foot area around anyone in a public right-of-way within 100 feet of a healthcare facility. The statute made it a misdemeanor knowingly to enter that area, without the person’s consent, in order to *753protest, counsel, educate, or hand out pamphlets. Hill, 120 S.Ct. at 2484 n. 1. An eight-foot zone around a person’s body is manifestly different from a zone of one hundred, thirty, or even five houses around a residence. In case this should be in doubt, the Hill Court explicitly stated that the Colorado ordinance “interfere[d] far less with a speaker’s ability to communicate than did the total ban on picketing on the sidewalk outside a residence (upheld in Frisby v. Schultz). . .” Id. at 2497. If Frisby does not help Fargo, neither can Hill.
III.
I believe the City is liable here. The ordinance is invalid on its face. A municipality faced with a § 1983 action cannot plead qualified or absolute immunity, nor is the good faith of its officers a sufficient defense. See Owen v. City of Independence, Missouri, 445 U.S. 622, 638, 100 S.Ct. 1398, 63 L.Ed.2d 673 (1980). A city is liable for damages under § 1983 if its officers deprive someone of liberty pursuant to a facially unconstitutional municipal ordinance. See, e.g., Douglas v. Brownell, 88 F.3d 1511 (8th Cir.1996) (denial of parade permit pursuant to overbroad permit ordinance); Gerritsen v. City of Los Angeles, 994 F.2d 570 (9th Cir.1993) (arrest pursuant to overbroad prohibition on demonstrating in a public park without a permit). The Fargo police did just that.
I respectfully dissent.

. The Court focuses on the circumstances under which the ordinance was applied, apparently taking the view that the plaintiffs' over-breadth claim must fail as long as the city could constitutionally prohibit the kind of conduct for which the plaintiffs were actually arrested. That is incorrect. The plaintiffs claim that the ordinance was overbroad on its face, not merely as applied to them. In evaluating the facial challenge, we must look not only at how the ordinance has actually been enforced, but, more importantly, at what sort of enforcement it authorizes. It is worth noting, however, Lhat, according to the police incident reports, the plaintiffs were arrested for marching silently back and forth in front of a six-house group: the Bovard residence, two houses on one side of it, and three on the other. JA 189, 191, 194-95. This fact by itself prevents us from saving the ordinance by adopting a construction as narrow as the one in Frisby.