1A rights of anti-abortion activists upheld

LA Times: The Ninth Circuit said that the First Amendment rights of anti-abortion activists were infringed when they were ordered to leave the site of a middle school they were circling with enlarged images of aborted fetuses.

In Center for Bio-Ethical Reform v. Los Angeles County Sheriff Dept., a panel of the Ninth Circuit said that police violated the First Amendment when they required the activists to remove their truck from an area adjacent to the middle school. There was some disruption to normal school activities, but the court said that it was not acceptable to remove the speakers just when they started to get reactions from their intended audience and noted that “listeners’ reaction to speech is not a content-neutral basis for regulation.” The court added, “Plaintiffs’ speech was permitted until the students and drivers around the school reacted to it, at which point the speech was deemed disruptive and ordered stopped under § 626.8. This application of the statute raises serious First Amendment concerns.”

Read the opinion here. Read California Penal Code 626.8 here. The truck is the Canadian version of the Center’s trucks — presumably similar to those driven around the middle school. The Center’s website is here — WARNING, as soon as you access the website, a graphic video of an actual abortion in progress loads.