QuickTake:

The federal court ruling is a win for protesters seeking to prove their claims that police actions, such as barricading a street, infringed on their rights to free speech during a racially influenced 2020 march.

Springfield police lack immunity from claims that officers violated the free speech and other rights of protesters during a 2020 march, U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled Friday, Jan. 23.

A lawsuit filed by an organizer of the march, Black Unity, and five people attending the street demonstration alleges civil rights violations by the city and several individual Springfield police officers, including Richard Lewis, the city’s police chief at the time.

The July 29, 2020 march took place at a time of nationwide street protests against racism and police brutality. But the march “aimed mainly to protest a noose that had been hung from a tree in a yard on Bluebelle Way in Springfield’s Thurston Hills neighborhood, a house located across the street from a Black neighbor,” Aiken wrote.

The march took place about two months after the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was handcuffed and lying facedown on a Minneapolis street when a white police officer put his knee against Floyd’s neck for several minutes. The officer was later found guilty of murder and manslaughter.

The legal claims by the Springfield protesters remain as yet unproven, but Aiken’s ruling denies motions filed by the city of Springfield and by individual officers seeking summary judgment in their favor.

Much of Aiken’s ruling discusses the decision by Springfield police to erect barricades as a way to direct the march. Event organizers were not told there would be a barricade, and Aiken wrote that police “blocked access to more than half of the Thurston Hills neighborhood, which was the marchers’ intended audience.”

In court documents, police had argued that they should be shielded from the claims because of “qualified immunity.” The legal concept generally protects government officials, including police, from civil damages unless their conduct violates clearly established rights.

But Aiken disagreed.

“Given the long-standing precedent on prior restraints of street marches, a reasonable officer would have known that blockading a street march in advance of actual expression without lawful process or sufficient justification would violate the First Amendment,” Aiken wrote.

Aiken also referred to skirmishes involving protesters, police and counterprotesters.

A city spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and an attorney with the Civil Liberties Defense Center, which is representing the protesters, noted the length of Aiken’s opinion.

“Unfortunately we will not be able to get through the 120-page opinion before close of business today,” attorney Marianne Dugan said in an email, declining comment until Monday.

Regarding free-speech claims by protesters, Aiken wrote that the legal question about the police barricade “is whether the barricade was in fact an unlawful prior restraint on First Amendment activity or whether it was a reasonable time, place, and manner restriction.” 

Springfield police had said in court filings that they placed a barricade at the intersection of 67th and Dogwood streets “to prevent the marchers from continuing along 67th Street to Main Street, a busy five-lane road with a 45-mph speed limit that ‘has experienced numerous vehicle-versus-pedestrian crashes resulting in fatalities,’” Aiken wrote.

But Aiken noted that protesters, in their legal arguments, had said police set up the barricade two blocks from Main Street.

Another legal argument made by protesters was that the police actions were not “content neutral” because the barricade was not enforced against counterprotesters.

“The video evidence shows that, unlike the marchers, counter protesters were permitted to speak and assemble on both sides of the barrier,” Aiken wrote. “The evidence shows counter protesters filming from the police side of the barrier and even cheering on the officers.”

Aiken ruled that a “reasonable jury could find that the barricade was enforced only against the marchers, but not the counter protesters, because of the content of the marchers’ speech.”

Aiken also said that there were “disputes of material fact as to whether that restriction was ‘narrowly tailored’ to serve the stated public safety goal.”