Panhandlers Karen Otterson, left, and Don Norton, right, filed a lawsuit against the City of Springfield in 2013, claiming a violation of their First Amendment rights.
A federal appellate court ruled Friday that Springfield’s ordinance banning a certain form of panhandling downtown is unconstitutional.The case has been pending for almost two years, after panhandlers Don Norton and Karen Otterson of Springfield filed a class action lawsuit in September 2013. They alleged the City of Springfield violated their First Amendment right to free speech through an ordinance banning oral requests for immediate monetary donations in the city’s downtown. They also claimed certain Springfield police officers harassed them outside of the downtown, using a state law regarding business solicitations along roadsides.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which includes Springfield, ruled on Aug. 7 that the city’s panhandling ban doesn’t pass a test created in another panhandling case recently decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
That case, Reed v. Gilbert, arose from a town in Arizona and held that more strict regulations on certain signs than on others was “content-based” regulation, a form of discrimination based on the sign’s message. Applying the Reed decision to Norton and Otterson’s case, the appellate court held that the City of Springfield had failed to provide a “compelling justification” for why it should be allowed to distinguish between an unpopular form of speech – panhandling – and other forms of speech.
Friday’s decision reversed a lower court’s decision on Norton and Otterson’s lawsuit, sending the case back to the lower court to issue an injunction barring the city from enforcing its ordinance.
Norton says he and Otterson plan to seek damages in their case, although the decision from the appellate court did not touch on whether Springfield police had violated the panhandlers’ rights.
For more on this story, check out Illinois Times on Thursday, Aug. 13.
Read the background on this story here: http://illinoistimes.com/article-12815-panhandlers-sue-city.html
This article appears in Aug 6-12, 2015.
