A lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of protest curfews in New York City was dismissed and that decision was upheld by a US federal appeals court on Friday.
In response to the protests following the murder of George Floyd by former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin, curfews were imposed for a week in 2020. Lamel Jeffrey, Thaddeus Blake, and Chayse Pena were arrested and charged with violating these curfews. They later filed a lawsuit, claiming that the city’s restrictions on protests violated their First Amendment right to free assembly and their Fourteenth Amendment protection against unlawful arrest. However, in 2022, a federal district court dismissed the case, ruling that the curfews were a valid measure to ensure public safety and that there were plenty of alternative channels for expressing their views.
In a unanimous decision, Circuit Judge Reena Raggi upheld the ruling of the district court.
The curfew here … was imposed in response to documented violence, destruction, and looting across multiple areas of a large, densely populated city … it first relied on traditional policing; then, when criminally escalated, it supplemented traditional policing with … a curfew for an additional six nights … and finally, when conditions improved and stabilized, the City ended the curfew one night early.
Federal courts have consistently supported government restrictions on peaceful assembly as long as the regulations do not infringe upon the content or message of the protest. These limitations are usually put in place to ensure public safety. In 1941, the US Supreme Court acknowledged in Cox v. New Hampshire that certain restrictions on the time, place, and manner of assembly are acceptable under the First Amendment.
The plaintiff’s arrests under New York law are still considered valid in light of the outcome. There are still several ongoing disputes between George Floyd protestors and municipal officials in courts nationwide. In a similar case last year, a group of activists in Denver, Colorado, was awarded $14 million by a federal jury for enduring excessive force by the police.
