holding that an anti-loitering ordinance that made it unlawful “to remain in any one place with no apparent purpose” was unconstitutionally vague and explaining that “[i]t is difficult to imagine how any citizen of the city of Chicago standing in a public place with a group of people would know if he or she had an ‘apparent purpose’”
How later courts described this case
- holding that an anti-loitering ordinance that made it unlawful “to remain in any one place with no apparent purpose” was unconstitutionally vague and explaining that “[i]t is difficult to imagine how any citizen of the city of Chicago standing in a public place with a group of people would know if he or she had an ‘apparent purpose’”
- holding that a provision which criminalized loitering, defined as “to remain in any one place with no apparent purpose,” was “inherently subjective because its application depends on whether some purpose is ‘apparent’ to the officer on the scene,” and declaring that it was void for vagueness
- holding unconstitutionally vague an anti-loitering ordinance, which defined loitering as remaining in place with "no apparent purpose," finding that standard "inherently subjective because its application depends on whether some purpose is `apparent' to the officer on the scene."
- concluding that an ordinance “does not provide sufficiently specific limits on the enforcement discretion of the police to meet constitutional standards” because its application was “inherently subjective”
Written by the judges who cited it.
Distinguished
Distinguished by Dunnet Bay Construction Compan v. Erica J. Borggren, 799 F.3d 676 (2015)
527 U.S. 41, 119 S.Ct. 1849, 144 L.Ed.2d 67 (1999), also cited by Dunnet Bay, is inapposite.
Distinguished by United States v. Farhane, 634 F.3d 127 (2011)
Morales is distinguishable from this case in that the ordinance there at issue (1) reached a substantial amount of innocent conduct, (2) lacked a mens rea requirement to mitigate overbreadth concerns, and (3) had been interpreted by the state supreme court in a way that precluded the Supreme Court from adopting a narrow construction avoiding constitutional concerns
The opinion
Justice Kennedy,
concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
I join Parts I, II, and V of the Court’s opinion and concur in the judgment.
I also share many of the concerns Justice Stevens expresses in Part IV with respect to the sufficiency of notice under the ordinance. As interpreted by the Illinois Supreme Court, the Chicago ordinance would reach a broad range of innocent conduct. For this reason it is not necessarily saved by the requirement that the citizen must disobey a police order to disperse before there is a violation.
We have not often examined these types of orders. Cf. Shuttlesworth v. Birmingham, 382 U. S. 87 (1965). It can be assumed, however, that some police commands will subject a citizen to prosecution for disobeying whether or not the citizen knows why the order is given. Illustrative examples include when the police tell a pedestrian not to enter a building and the reason is to avoid impeding a rescue team, or to protect a crime scene, or to secure an area for the protection of a public official. It does not follow, however, that any unexplained police order must be obeyed without notice of the lawfulness of the order. The predicate of an order to disperse is not, in my view, sufficient to eliminate doubts regarding the adequacy of notice under this ordinance. A citizen, while engaging in a wide array of innocent conduct, is not likely to know when he may be subject to a dispersal order based on the officer’s own knowledge of the identity or affiliations of other persons with whom the citizen is con *70 gregating; nor may the citizen be able to assess what an officer might conceive to be the citizen’s lack of an apparent purpose.