Adderley v. Florida (1966)
Adderley v. Florida (1966)
385 U.S. 39
During the 1950s and 1960s the Court decided several cases involving demonstrations by civil rights groups. Adderley involved a group of students who demonstrated peacefully on the grounds of a county jail to protest the arrest of fellow demonstrators and local racial segregation. After ignoring a sheriff’s warning to leave the premises, several demonstrators were arrested and convicted under a Florida trespass statute. The convictions were affirmed in the state courts, and the Supreme Court granted certiorari.
Opinion of the Court: Black, Clark, Harlan, Stewart, White.
Dissenting opinion: Douglas, Brennan, Warren, Fortas.
Mr. Justice Black delivered the opinion of the Court.
Petitioners have insisted from the beginning of this case that it is controlled by and must be reversed because of our prior cases of Edwards v. South Carolina (1963) . . . and Cox v. Louisiana [1965]. . . . We cannot agree.
The Edwards case, like this one, did come up when a number of persons demonstrated on public property against their State’s segregation policies. They also sang hymns and danced, as did the demonstrators in this case. But here the analogies to this case end. In Edwards, the demonstrators went to the South Carolina State Capitol grounds to protest. In this case they went to the jail. Traditionally, state capitol grounds are open to the public. Jails, built for security purposes, are not. The demonstrators at the South Carolina Capitol went in through a public driveway and as they entered they were told by state officials there that they had a right as citizens to go through the State House grounds as long as they were peaceful. Here the demonstrators entered the jail grounds through a driveway used only for jail purposes and without warning to or permission from the sheriff. More importantly, South Carolina sought to prosecute its State Capitol demonstrators by charging them with the common-law crime of breach of the peace. This Court in Edwards took pains to point out at length the indefinite, loose, and broad nature of this charge. . . . South Carolina’s power to prosecute, it was emphasized, . . . would have been different had the State proceeded under a “precise and narrowly drawn regulatory statute evincing a legislative judgment that certain specific conduct be limited or proscribed” such as, for example, “limiting the periods during which the State House grounds were open to the public.” The South Carolina breach-of-the-peace statute was thus struck down as being so broad and all-embracing as to jeopardize speech, press, assembly and petition. . . . And it was on this same ground of vagueness that in Cox v. Louisiana ... the Louisiana breach-of-the-peace law used to prosecute Cox was invalidated.
The Florida trespass statute under which these petitioners were charged cannot be challenged on this ground. It is aimed at conduct of one limited kind, that is, for one person or persons to trespass upon the property of another with a malicious and mischievous intent. There is no lack of notice in this law, nothing to entrap or fool the unwary. Petitioners here contend that “Petitioners’ convictions are based on a total lack of relevant evidence.” If true, this would be a denial of due process. . . . [However,] petitioners’ summary of facts, as well as that of the Circuit Court, shows an abundance of facts to support the jury’s verdict of guilty in this case. . . .
[Justice Black then summarized the facts of the case.]
The sheriff, as jail custodian, had power. . . to direct that this large crowd of people get off the grounds. There is not a shred of evidence in this record that this power was exercised, or that its exercise was sanctioned by the lower courts, because the sheriff objected to what was being sung or said by the demonstrators or because he disagreed with the objectives of their protest. The record reveals that he objected only to their presence on that part of the jail grounds reserved for jail uses. There is no evidence at all that on any other occasion had similarly large groups of the public been permitted to gather on this portion of the jail grounds for any purpose. Nothing in the Constitution of the United States prevents Florida from even-handed enforcement of its general trespass statute against those refusing to obey the sheriff’s order to remove themselves from what amounted to the curtilage of the jailhouse. The State, no less than a private owner of property, has power to preserve the property under its control for the use to which it is lawfully dedicated. For this reason there is no merit to the petitioners’ argument that they had a constitutional right to stay on the property, over the jail custodian’s objections, because this “area chosen for the peaceful civil rights demonstration was not only ‘reasonable’ but also particularly appropriate.” Such an argument has as its major unarticulated premise the assumption that people who want to propagandize protests or views have a constitutional right to do so whenever and however and wherever they please. That concept of constitutional law was vigorously and forthrightly rejected [previously]…. We reject it again. The United States Constitution does not forbid a State to control the use of its own property for its own lawful nondiscriminatory purpose.
These judgments are
Affirmed.
Mr. Justice Douglas, with whom The Chief Justice, Mr. Justice Brennan, and Mr. Justice Fortas concur, dissenting.
The jailhouse, like an executive mansion, a legislative chamber, a courthouse, or the state-house itself . . . is one of the seats of government, whether it be the Tower of London, the Bastille, or a small county jail. And when it houses political prisoners or those who many think are unjustly held, it is an obvious center for protest. The right to petition for the redress of grievances has an ancient history and is not limited to writing a letter or sending a telegram to a congressman; it is not confined to appearing before the local city council, or writing letters to the President or Governor or Mayor. . . . Conventional methods of petitioning may be, and often have been, shut off to large groups of our citizens. Legislators may turn deaf ears; formal complaints may be routed endlessly through a bureaucratic maze; courts may let the wheels of justice grind very slowly. Those who do not control television and radio, those who cannot afford to advertise in newspapers or circulate elaborate pamphlets may have only a more limited type of access to public officials. Their methods should not be condemned as tactics of obstruction and harassment as long as the assembly and petition are peaceable, as these were. There is no question that petitioners had as their purpose a protest against the arrest of Florida A.& M. students for trying to integrate public theatres. . . . There was no violence; no threat of violence; no attempted jail break; no storming of a prison; no plan or plot to do anything but protest. The evidence is uncontradicted that the petitioners’ conduct did not upset the jailhouse
routine; things went on as they normally would. We do violence to the First Amendment when we permit this “petition for redress of grievances” to be turned into a trespass action. To say that a private owner could have done the same if the rally had taken place on private property is to speak of a different case, as an assembly and a petition for redress of grievances run to government, not to private proprietors. . . .
There may be some public places which are so clearly committed to other purposes that their use for the airing of grievances is anomalous. There may be some instances in which assemblies and petitions for redress of grievances are not consistent with other necessary purposes of public property. A noisy meeting may be out of keeping with the serenity of the statehouse or the quiet of the courthouse. No one, for example, would suggest that the Senate gallery is the proper place for a vociferous protest rally. And in other cases it may be necessary to adjust the right to petition for redress of grievances to the other interests inhering in the uses to which the public property is normally put. . . . But this is quite different from saying that all public places are off limits to people with grievances. . . . And it is farther yet from saying that the “custodian” of the public property in his discretion can decide when public places shall be used for the communication of ideas, especially the constitutional right to assemble and petition for redress of grievances. . . .