In Denver’s annual October spectacle, more than 200 protesters who consider Christopher Columbus a genocidal murderer delayed the 2004 parade by Italian-American organizations who consider him a hero.
Eight protesters went to trial on trumped-down charges such as loitering or failing to obey a police officer. They were found not guilty by a panel of judges who found the city’s loitering ordinance to be unconstitutionally vague in such circumstances.
Indeed, how is it possible to “loiter, loaf, wander, stand or remain idle” and simultaneously engage in an act of civil disobedience? We felt strongly that Denver needed to update its laws so both protesters and police would know the rules of the road.
Now the City Council is well along the way to such a solution, and we trust that before the next parade, two new laws will be in place and in force.
The new ordinances ban unlawfully obstructing roadways and entryways to disrupt lawful events. They will make it easier for prosecutors to convict protesters who choose to interfere with another group.
City Attorney Cole Finegan said the two ordinances are taken “almost verbatim” from similar state statutes on the books since the 1960s. One ordinance bans unlawfully obstructing a “highway, street, sidewalk, railway, waterway, building entrance, elevator, aisle, stairway or hallway” to which the public has access and disobeying a lawful order to move. The other forbids preventing or disrupting a “lawful meeting, procession, parade or gathering.”
“All we’re trying to do … is give better tools to police officers and prosecutors, and not just in the context of the Columbus Day Parade,” Finegan said. “We think they will pass constitutional muster.
“We want to assure everybody’s First Amendment rights are respected,” he said. “The people pulling the permit for the parade, and the people who are unhappy and don’t like Columbus.” Protesters will be able to demonstrate against the parade – they just won’t be able to lie down in the street to stop it.
Whether the bans stand up “is going to depend a lot on what does it mean to ‘disrupt’ a lawful proceeding,” said David Lane, a Denver defense attorney. “So the issue here is whether the word ‘disrupting’ will be interpreted by police in an unconstitutional way.”
We’ll see. Exercising freedom of expression doesn’t give one the right to muzzle those one disagrees with, a concept the protesters can’t seem to grasp. These two laws should remedy that.
