Court Opinion

ID: 9459122
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 21:11:26.111013+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:36:01.973892
License: Public Domain

J. SKELLY WRIGHT, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
For obvious reasons, the majority feels the need to distinguish the Rosen-feld, Lewis and Brown cases decided by the Supreme Court after our panel opinions came down. I submit the distinctions sought to be made are without substance.
The majority asserts that “[t]he issue of statutory overbreadth is not a problem in the District of Columbia” because 22 D.C.Code §§ 1107 and 1121 “have been subjected to a narrowing construction by this court in Williams v. District of Columbia * * Yet in Rosenfeld *1258v. New Jersey the Supreme Court summarily vacated a New Jersey disorderly conduct conviction over Mr. Justice Powell’s dissenting opinion wherein he correctly pointed out that the New Jersey Supreme Court’s construction of its statute was almost identical to the construction of our statute adopted in Williams.
The majority also says our task is made easier by the fact that we can uphold the arrest in this case without reaching the question whether the underlying statute could constitutionally support a conviction. Perhaps I am overly simplistic about these matters, but I had thought that the First Amendment protected citizens from harassing arrests as well as convictions. Indeed, the Supreme Court has even held that when arrests are made by state officers for conduct which cannot possibly serve as a constitutional predicate for conviction, the federal courts have a special obligation to intervene. See Younger v. Harris, 401 U.S. 37, 91 S.Ct. 746, 27 L.Ed.2d 669 (1971); Dombrowski v. Pfister, 380 U.S. 479, 85 S.Ct. 1116, 14 L.Ed.2d 22 (1961). In. my view, we should fulfill that obligation on this appeal.