A Stitch in Haste

...let's turn our attention to another anti-youth travesty: curfews.

The Florida Supreme Court...ruled that citywide teen curfews in Tampa and Pinellas Park are unconstitutional, upholding a lower court decision from 2002.

The state's high court issued a 91-page ruling calling the Tampa and Pinellas Park ordinances, passed in the late 1990s, too broad. Neither ordinance has been enforced in recent years.
...
The court's decision by a narrow majority said the ordinances did not provide enough exemptions for minors who had good reason to be out after curfew, and said the Tampa ordinance wasn't supported by adequate statistics. The court called the criminal penalties the "most troubling aspect" of the ordinances.

"Under both the Tampa and the Pinellas Park ordinances, juveniles and parents can be incarcerated and fined after the first curfew violation," the ruling states. "Most of the ordinances that have been upheld as constitutional only impose civil fines or community service requirements."
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Coincidentally, on the same day, the Tampa City Council gave final approval to a new Ybor City curfew. City officials said they expect the new curfew to withstand any legal challenge because it was crafted with issues raised by the appeals court in mind. ...It bans anyone younger than 18 from Ybor City between the hours of 11 p.m. and 4 a.m., Thursday through Saturday. Violators would get a trespass warning banishing them for six months from [a well-defined] area.... Anyone who violates the warning could be arrested.
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The Ybor City ordinance, said Tampa city attorney Smith, seems to meet the Supreme Court's requirements for narrow tailoring because it is confined to a small geographic area, limited days and hours and has crime statistics to back it up. It also has a range of exemptions that includes minors traveling to and from jobs; attending church, school or government-sponsored events; accompanied by their parents or living in the area. But the criminal penalty may be a sticking point.

Having read through the majority opinion, it seems to me that Florida is still not quite where it needs to be on this issue. It's refreshing to see the correct, highest standard of review applied to something as extreme as a curfew (as opposed to the typical cop-out of "children simply do not have the same rights as adults"). Still, I don't think the Florida high court applied that test correctly.

To review: Strict scrutiny means that a law must be narrowly tailored to meet a compelling government interest. Even if you assume that "keeping kids off the street at night" is a "compelling government interest" (I'll leave challenging that to the hyper-anarcho-libertarians), I refuse to accept the premise that a law that bans someone from simply being somewhere passively, without more (i.e., actually engaging in some kind of specific active conduct) can ever meet the "narrowly tailored" prong of strict scrutiny.

The only proper curfew law must allow those who have never committed a public wrong, whether criminal or civil, to continue not committing public wrongs. Only after a teenager misbehaves in some clearly-defined way (e.g., commits vandalism, violates a noise ordinance or drinks in public) would it then clearly be proper to impose, as part of the punishment, a curfew. The curfew would conceptually be no different from imposing restrictions upon a released convict serving probation. But no one, even a teenager, must ever be "pre-punished" based merely on probabilities, consensus attitudes about "proper" (as opposed to "legal") conduct or even "compelling government interests."

Any law that makes it per se illegal for someone, anyone, simply to be somewhere, without more, is unacceptable. That includes the new Ybor curfew described in the article. Unfortunately, based on the Florida Supreme Court's holding, the new curfew will probably be upheld.

For Discussion: How much of a leap is it to next argue that adults simply cannot have any "valid" reason being in, say, areas where drug dealing or prostitution are prevalent. If you watch "COPS" at all you're likely to hear the term "loitering in a known drug area" thrown around. Is it really too much to ask that the police actually wait until a real crime has been committed before imposing a punishment?

Alternatively, consider this story:

Libraries in Orange County [Florida] have barred unaccompanied adults from lingering in the children's areas of its 14 branches, a policy that is among the first of its kind in the nation.

Since Nov. 1, adults without children may select items in the children's section, but they cannot read books or loiter in the department, said Marilyn Hoffman, community-relations coordinator.

Officials with the Association for Library Service to Children said many libraries limit adults' use of computers or bathrooms in the children's departments, but Orange County's policy could be the first in the nation to restrict adults' presence in the areas.

"It's not a common trend, but I think it's going to become more common," said Cynthia Richey, a former association president. "It's, in part, a pre-emptive move."

"Pre-emptive" restrictions of liberty to be in a public place. So much for "narrowly-tailored" laws. How sad, and how ominous.