Court Opinion

ID: 9423101
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:05:57.094718+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:42.261755
License: Public Domain

*99Mr. Justice Brennan,
concurring.
I join the Court’s opinion on my understanding that Middlebrooks v. City of Birmingham, is being read as holding that § 1142 applies only when a person (a) stands, loiters or walks on a street or sidewalk so as to obstruct free passage, (b) is requested by an officer to move on, and (c) thereafter continues to block passage by loitering or standing on the street. It is only this limiting construction which saves the statute from the constitutional challenge that it is overly broad. Moreover, because this construction delimits the statute to “the sort of ‘hard-core’ conduct that would obviously be prohibited under any construction,” Dombrowski v. Pfister, 380 U. S. 479, 491-492, it may be legitimately applied to such conduct occurring before that construction.