Court Opinion

ID: 9464166
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 23:26:45.823238+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:38:29.682120
License: Public Domain

WILKEY, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I concur in Judge Leventhal’s opinion for the court. My separate observations are directed to three aspects relating to damages which will confront the trial judge on this remand.
1. It is noteworthy that we have not enunciated any precise mathematical standard for the calculation of damages for the First Amendment violation, the interruption of the plaintiffs’ vigil in front of the White House. Indeed, there probably is none; at least we have not discovered it. The plaintiffs sought $10,000 each for First Amendment damages, the District Judge awarded $100 each. On remand we leave him to fix the figure somewhere between these two poles.
2. It is difficult to blink the fact that these plaintiffs and the others of their group had a permit for their vigil or demonstration, and therefore they reasonably could expect uninterrupted exercise of their First Amendment rights. The court’s opinion takes the position, legally proper I must agree, that it follows that the plaintiffs should not be charged with foreseeing the series of unfortunate incidents which occurred to them.
That is not all the story. True, a group of two hundred responsible mature adults parading peacefully in front of the White House, with the avowed purpose “to hold Richard Nixon in the light,” is not likely to incite a riot. And, yet, anyone with a knowledge of crowd psychology and our particular local situation in Washington, D.C., knows that any crowd on the sidewalk *1286at the very gates of the White House is likely to attract other less disciplined demonstrators to join or, indeed, to oppose the purpose of the first group. A group of demonstrators, no matter how well disciplined and intentioned, can serve as an incendiary core, so our experience tells us.
Going further into the practically foreseeable, given the sensitivity of the location involved here, it can be presumed that the police would be equally sensitive and alert to forestall any disturbance affecting the home of the President. (Within the past year an intruder was shot dead on the grounds.) Of course, the District Judge here properly found, looking at the situation objectively and in retrospect, that the inspector in charge reacted too hastily and severely.
Should the plaintiffs, having secured their permit, be charged with foreseeing improper action by the police? Perhaps not, if the issue is so phrased, but putting the matter in reverse, should any group of demonstrators at such a sensitive location ever believe that they have an ironclad guarantee that the police will, in all circumstances which conceivably could arise, act with 100% propriety? If experience, a good part of which is recorded in judicial decisions, is any guide, no such expectation could reasonably be entertained. In truth, on the basis of all human experience, the safe prediction is that the police will make human errors; only the nature and degree is uncertain. So, however firm the legal position of the plaintiffs was after receiving their permit, there were certain risks — foreseeable risks — in the enterprise on which they embarked.
Furthermore, the twenty-seven plaintiffs on this appeal had an opportunity to cut their risks at the time some of these risks were obviously developing, i. e., unlike the great majority of their group of two hundred, they did not accede to Inspector Trussell’s request to go across the street into Lafayette Park, an equally public but less sensitive area. I agree that these twenty-seven had a right to remain on the White House sidewalk — the First Amendment and their permit said so — just as they later had a right not to post collateral, but a look ahead at likely consequences in each instance called for a less extreme assertion of those rights at the given time and place. Such a prudential exercise of rights would not in any way have waived their contention that they had a right to be on the White House sidewalk, not in Lafayette Park, and that they had a right to be free from illegal arrest and the concomitant necessity of posting collateral as an alternative to jail.
I suggest that the risks inherent in the plaintiffs’ enterprise from the beginning, some of which materialized, and the choices made as events unfolded, have some bearing on the damages to be awarded.
3. Plaintiffs’ enterprise was a collective one throughout. The plan to conduct a vigil was carefully coordinated as to personnel involved, the time and place, and the message to be proclaimed. There were no discordant notes, this was not an affair in which each demonstrator was there to do his own thing. The twenty-seven plaintiffs, when asked to move to Lafayette Park, talked it over and decided to remain together on the White House sidewalk. They were collectively arrested and transported to the station house.
We recognize First Amendment rights as individual rights. The violation of First Amendment rights here was, in the usual sense, a violation of each individual’s rights. In each instance rights were violated in the same way and in the same degree, which means that the damages awarded to each plaintiff should be exactly the same, as they were for The First Amendment violations here.
The exact equality among the twenty-seven of the violation and the damages to be awarded would not, alone in itself, suggest a collective approach in calculating damages, but the collective nature of the enterprise until the moment of disruption, when the group of two hundred was told to move, does. The plaintiffs had a common objective which was frustrated. Their loss, in a sense, is a collective loss. The measure of damages can, then, be more fairly as*1287sessed as collective damages, though recognizing that the rights violated were individual rights.
This approach would provide some guide between the $10,000 and $100 per plaintiff, where the court’s opinion leaves the District Judge. We have given no monetary hint as to how much the First Amendment is individually worth in these circumstances, because we have not found that anywhere in the law. Looking at the wrong done as a collective wrong, the total amount awarded against the defendant District of Columbia should be sufficiently sizeable to discourage repetition of such illegal police action in the future, without being of such horrendous size as to shock the public — taxpaying— conscience. The total amount should be sufficient, when divided among the twenty-seven plaintiffs, to give each an amount which will assure him that First Amendment rights are not lightly to be disregarded and that they can be truly vindicated in the courts.
I think such a collective approach to damages would not only vindicate the First Amendment, but would, as a practical matter, tend to preserve its free exercise in the District of Columbia. For if the plaintiffs’ claims of $10,000 per demonstrator per police violation are taken as the standard penalty to be assessed against the government, we shall soon — given the inevitable recurrence of large mass demonstrations in the nation’s capital — find the Congress (or the City Council) tired of paying the bill for almost equally inevitable police errors, and ultimately banning all demonstrators from the White House area, Lafayette Park, and all other symbolic places, just as the Capitol grounds and other public buildings have already been put off limits to the kind of demonstration which was originally permitted to take place here.