Court Opinion

ID: 9608352
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 03:10:57.961577+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:02:45.716240
License: Public Domain

GRIFFITH, Circuit Judge,
concurring separately in the denial of rehearing:
I take the unusual step of responding to the concurrence the majority has affixed to the panel’s denial of rehearing. I do so because the majority has added to the problem of the panel opinion (about which I have already written) by offering an interpretation of the District of Columbia’s riot statute that will chill lawful political expression. The District’s statute identifies only two categories of offense: (1) willfully engaging in a riot; and (2) willfully inciting or urging others to riot. See D.C.Code § 22-1322 (2009). The majority would extend the statute to reach those who are “aware of the violence and yet continued to march” by presuming that a marcher who fails to quit a lawful protest after seeing others in the group begin to riot is, by his presence alone, willfully inciting or urging the others to riot. Under this reading, for which there is no warrant in the text of the statute or in the cases that have construed it, a peaceful marcher who becomes aware of the violent acts of a few on the fringes of the crowd could be arrested for rioting unless he abandons his otherwise lawful protest. This interpretation will make a would-be demonstrator think twice before taking to the steps of the Capitol or the National Mall. As the sole support for its view, the majority cites a decision of an Arizona intermediate appellate court that applied that state’s law to a prison riot. See State v. Garland, 157 Ariz. 246, 756 P.2d 343, 345 (1988). The circumstances of that case seem far afield from those before us and offer a tenuous basis for the majority’s unnecessarily expansive approach.