MLM Counties News. Notices. Need-to-know Information.
Members of Occupy St. Louis have been protesting in Kiener Plaza since Oct. 1.
A federal judge denied an injunction that would have barred the city of St. Louis from enforcing curfew and other ordinances against the protesters.
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Lawyers for members of Occupy St. Louis will be in federal court Tuesday morning, seeking a preliminary injunction barring the city of St. Louis from enforcing curfew and other ordinances against the protesters.
U.S. District Judge Carol E. Jackson, who on Friday night denied the plaintiffs’ motion for a temporary restraining order, will hear the arguments.
The protesters had been “occupying” Kiener Plaza in downtown St. Louis since Oct. 1, but last week city officials told them all tents had to be taken down by 3 p.m. Friday and that police would begin enforcing the 10 p.m. park curfew. Protesters may gather at Kiener Plaza between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. and may gather on the sidewalk around the park all day and all night, Jeff Rainford, Mayor Francis Slay’s chief of staff, said last week.
Police began arresting protesters after Jackson, of the Eastern District of Missouri, denied the plaintiffs’ TRO motion just before midnight Friday.
“Our position was those rules and regulations are content-neutral and applied against the board,” the city’s lawyer, Michael Garvin, said Monday.
While the protesters argue their First Amendment right to free speech and assembly should trump city ordinances, the First Amendment is not absolute.
In 1984, the U.S. Supreme decided Clark v. Community for Creative Nonviolence, finding that National Park Service regulations prohibiting camping in Lafayette Park and the Mall, in Washington, D.C., do not violate the First Amendment.
In that case, the purpose of the Community for Creative Nonviolence demonstration was to highlight the plight of the homeless, and the Park Service granted the group a permit to build two symbolic tent cities. But the Park Service denied the group’s request that protesters be allowed to sleep in the tents.
In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court upheld the Park Service’s regulations because “expression, whether oral or written or symbolized by conduct, is subject to reasonable time, place, or manner restrictions.”
“That sleeping, like the symbolic tents themselves, may be expressive and part of the message delivered by the demonstration does not make the ban any less a limitation on the manner of demonstrating, for reasonable time, place, or manner regulations normally have the purpose and direct effect of limiting expression, but are nevertheless valid,” Justice Byron White wrote for the majority.
Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by Justice William Brennan Jr.
A federal judge in Sacramento cited Clark when he denied a temporary restraining order in Occupy Sacramento et al. v. City of Sacramento et al. U.S. District Judge Morrison C. England Jr. said in his Nov. 4 order that the protesters are unlikely to succeed in their facial challenge to the Sacramento park curfew. The ordinance “appears to be a narrowly-tailored and content-neutral time, place and manner restriction that applies to anyone who wishes to use the park during certain hours,” he wrote.
The plaintiffs in the St. Louis federal lawsuit argued in their TRO motion that the tents erected in Kiener Plaza were “a form of symbolic speech.”
“The tents also draw more attention to the protesters and allow protesters to convey their messages at all times to increase awareness,” the plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote in a court filing. Joseph P. Welch, Maggie Ellinger-Locke and Cynthia West are representing the plaintiffs.
Some of Occupy protesters are homeless and were living in the tents. At a meeting held last week with Rainford and other city officials, Occupy members said they needed to be permitted to spend the night in tents in the park because their homeless members have no place else to go.
The city offered to provide services for the homeless, but one homeless woman, Amy Moore, said Friday she doesn’t qualify for the rapid housing program because she has no money coming in. She said she has been calling homeless shelter and domestic violence shelters to no avail.
West did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.
The case is Compton et al. v. St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners et al., 4:11-cv-1975.
