Court Opinion

ID: 9469486
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:41:41.011448+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:24.630550
License: Public Domain

MURNAGHAN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
Judge Chapman’s articulate and eminently reasonable opinion has much to commend it. Still, I am persuaded that the ordinance does not pass First Amendment muster. It suffers from overbreadth and from a lack of sufficient standards for determining whether performance permits should be issued or denied.
Thus, I dissent for the reasons expressed by Judge Albert V. Bryan, Jr. in his opinion from the bench on August 13, 1981 in Davenport v. City of Alexandria, et al., Civil Action No. 81-709-A in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. In particular, I find the law correctly stated and applied in the following excerpts:
The activity of the plaintiff is clearly First Amendment activity, and as such, is protected. It is not an absolute right, but when the City undertakes to restrict it in any way, then, it seems to me the burden is on the City to find some reasonable accommodation between the First Amendment activity of the plaintiff and the legitimate governmental interest it has in preserving the free flow of pedestrian traffic and public access to its commercial buildings.
This ordinance, however, sweeps too broadly. It amounts to a total ban of this plaintiff and others of their performances on all the sidewalks within the central business district, which as shown on Defendant’s Exhibit 3, is an approximately one-mile-long, four-block-wide area of the City, bisected by the main street of Alexandria, King Street, the City’s main East-West street, and bounded by the river on the East and West Street on the West.
It catches this plaintiff acting by himself, as well as a group composed of ten. It catches and prohibits the activity of this plaintiff and others regardless of the number of them that are in the block, regardless of the width of the sidewalk, and more importantly, regardless of whether they, by their activities, impede or deny public access to commercial buildings or impede the free flow of pedestrian traffic.
So, while I am confident that a carefully and narrowly drawn ordinance would pass constitutional muster, insofar as overbreadth is concerned, if it limited the number, limited the area, and limited the scope of the performance, and hinged its application or the issuance or revocation of a permit to public access to commercial buildings and free flow of pedestrian traffic, this ordinance does none of those things. Suffering in the case of the ban on the sidewalk performances from over-breadth, and suffering in the case of the permissive granting of permits from a failure to provide specific standards under which permits would be issued or denied, the ordinance is unconstitutional, and the Court so declares.