Dallas City Council will vote to pay $270,000 to make protesters’ free-speech lawsuit go away

[TexasTowelie]

G.J. McCarthy/The Dallas Morning News


David Woo/Staff photographer
Leslie Harris, left, and Carol Ezell, at the corner of SMU Boulevard and N. Central Expressway following the opening of the Bush Presidential Center in 2013.

Almost two years after six people sued the city of Dallas — twice — over its ordinance prohibiting protests near a roadway, that lawsuit’s about to vanish. All the Dallas City Council has to do is agree to pay the defendants no more than $270,000.

The suit stems from protests that took place in January 2013 along Mockingbird Lane and Central Expressway, near the George W. Bush Presidential Center that was three months away from opening. During those protests Dallas police ticketed people carrying signs that read, among other things, “I love the Bill of Rights” and “I love the First Amendment.” In order to avoid a repeat performance during the center’s April 25, 2013, dedication ceremony attended by President Obama and the rest of the X-Presidents, six plaintiffs sued the city to overturn a 1989 ordinance that made it illegal to protest within 75 feet of a major highway.

Initially, the Dallas City Attorney’s Office vehemently defended the law. In court documents filed on April 17, 2013, city attorneys called it “a reasonable, content-neutral restriction on the time, place, and manner of speech permitted along the side of highways in the City in the interest of public safety.” But just two days later, U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis sided with the protesters, blasting the ordinance as “unconstitutionally vague” and therefore unenforceable.

The ordinance was eventually rewritten in January 2014 to more generally outlaw “individuals carrying signs, wearing costumes, or engaging in other activities intended to draw attention to their signs or themselves.” Four council members — Philip Kingston, Carolyn Davis, Scott Griggs and Adam Medrano — voted against the ordinance in any form. Kingston called it “anti-free speech.” Dwaine Caraway, siding with Dallas Police Chief David Brown, insisted it was just “pro-safety.”

Read more: http://cityhallblog.dallasnews.com/2015/02/dallas-city-council-will-vote-to-pay-270000-to-make-protesters-free-speech-lawsuit-go-away.html/

[font color=green]The article also says that the city council voted iwithout discussion to scrap the ordinance entirely following a third suit filed by the anti-Obama group Overpasses for America in November 2014.[/font]