Those federal judges make such wonderful decisions, right Lazarre?
Judge nullifies city's parade permit rule
By William F. Doherty, Globe Staff, 07/07/98
Ruling in favor of a white supremacist group barred from marching in Boston in 1994, a federal judge has struck down the city's ordinance on parade permits, saying it violates the First Amendment by giving officials too much discretion to deny permits based on the political views of the marchers.
US District Judge George A. O'Toole said that the city unfairly denied a request for Richard Barrett and his Mississippi-based Nationalist Movement to march in South Boston in March 1994. O'Toole said the reasons the city offered for denying the permit - traffic congestion and public safety concerns stemming from clashes with counterdemonstrators - were pretexts for keeping an offensive group off the streets.
''The nature and content of the Nationalist Movement's message was the predominant reason it was treated differently and had its permit request denied,'' the judge declared in a ruling issued last week. O'Toole added that ''city officials behaved like a latter-day Watch and Ward Society guarding against offensive political opinion.''
In a statement, the city law department said: ''We are reviewing the judge's decision. Over the next couple of days we will be plotting our course from there.''
City rules allow officials to reject parades that would disrupt traffic or require undue police protection. The Nationalist Movement, Boston officials reasoned, would attract opponents who might engage in clashes. Therefore, it was feared that the amount of police needed to protect people on both sides would leave other parts of the city unguarded.
O'Toole rejected those arguments, saying the rules gave city officials ''too much discretion without appropriate limits or standards.''
He entered a permanent injunction prohibiting the city from enforcing its parade regulations until they are rewritten to leave ''no leeway for content-based restrictions as to who ought to be permitted to march.''
By telephone from Learned, Miss., yesterday, Barrett called the ruling a victory for the ''majority.''
''It sends a powerful message that the era of favors and privileges for minorities is coming to an end,'' he said. ''It gives momentum to the pro-majority cause.''
Despite being denied a permit, Barrett marched anyway, following the sidewalk along Broadway and holding a rally in front of South Boston High School. Police separated a large crowd of counterdemonstrators from the handful of marchers.
Barrett chose Boston for his march after the city received national publicity because the annual St. Patrick's Day parade was canceled in a dispute over the participation of gays and lesbians.
O'Toole's ruling will have no effect on the St. Patrick's Day Parade. The US Supreme Court ruled in 1995 that the private organization running the parade cannot be denied a permit for excluding some groups.
In the case of the Nationalist Movement, O'Toole said, the city treated the supremacist group differently than others seeking permits under similar circumstances. The city has approved other marches in equally congested areas, he said. And at other times, police said they could handle any safety concerns posed by counterdemonstrators.
O'Toole awarded Barrett $700 in travel expenses he incurred fighting for the permit. The judge also said Barrett's attorney, Harvey Schwartz, should be entitled to recover his fees from the city.
The judge pointed out that Barrett's group prevailed by relying on legal tenets designed to protect minorities - the very people that Barrett's group opposes.
''Not insignificantly, much of the law that protects the plaintiff's rights here developed as a result of the courage of the pioneers of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s,'' O'Toole said.
In a last-ditch attempt to avoid a confrontation, the city had tried to persuade Barrett to move his demonstration to City Hall Plaza or Boston Common, on the theory that those locations would provide a less-violent environment and be more conducive to crowd control. But O'Toole said yesterday that changing the location would have changed the character of the message.
Barrett had made it clear that he wanted to make his point by holding a parade on at least part of the route of the traditional St. Patrick's Day Parade.
O'Toole said, ''The anticipation of a hostile reaction does not permit the city to require that the plaintiff alter or muffle its intended expression any more than it permits the city to prohibit it.''
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 07/07/98.
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