The Syracuse Common Council recently approved a six-figure payout to an anti-gay protester who sued the city for violating his First and 14th Amendment rights at two CNY Pride Festivals.

The city was ordered to pay more than $127,200 in legal fees and $1 in damages to Jim Deferio, a street preacher and anti-gay protester, who had been required to stand across the street from where the event was held in June at the Inner Harbor. Deferio is well-known for his preaching and often chants with a loudspeaker near Syracuse University’s Schine Student Center.

Free speech experts say Deferio’s lawsuit against Syracuse was justified.  

Roy Gutterman, director of SU’s Tully Center for Free Speech, called the judge’s decision fair. He said Deferio “has a right to protest in a public space.”

“These types of cases are becoming more and more common, as are protests,” Gutterman added. “It’s a case-by-case vision, but you don’t keep the peace by prohibiting someone’s rights.”

Syracuse police established a 40-foot buffer zone at the festival in 2014 and 2015 to keep Deferio away from the event. Deferio sued the city, and in 2016, U.S. District Judge Lawrence Kahn ruled that police could not enforce the buffer zone because it restricted Deferio from speaking to people freely in a public space.

Deferio declined to comment on the suit and referred all questions to the Center for Religious Expression, a Tennessee-based organization that represented Deferio in the lawsuit. The organization did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Deferio’s suit against Syracuse was not his first court battle against a city government.

In 2008, Deferio sued the city of Ithaca after police cited him for violation of a noise ordinance while he was preaching, according to The Cornell Daily Sun. He was also involved in a 2008 suit against the city of Elmira, which is southwest of Ithaca, after the city’s police officers threatened to arrest Deferio and two other protesters at a gay pride event.  

Thomas Keck, a political science professor at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, said that cities paying legal fees is common with cases like Deferio’s.

“Anytime two competing sets of protesters are there at the same time, the police are focused on the public safety and keeping the balance,” Keck said.

When Kahn ruled against Syracuse and its buffer zone outside the CNY Pride Festival, he noted similarities between Deferio’s case and that of a Massachusetts law establishing a 35-foot buffer zone outside abortion clinics, according to Syracuse.com. In the 2014 U.S Supreme Court case McCullen v. Coakley, the court ruled that the law was unconstitutional because it restricted the free speech of protesters on public sidewalks.  

Similar buffer zones have also resulted in lawsuits. In 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the city of Miami in federal court after a “no-protest” zone outside the Miami Seaquarium prevented animal rights advocates from protesting on public sidewalks. The city had cited “safety concerns” as justification for the 25-foot buffer zone, but it backed down after the lawsuit.

David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, a California-based organization committed to promoting free speech and government accountability, said a buffer zone could be constitutional, if it was made for safety and to separate two groups of opposing protesters.

“The police went out of their way to single Deferio out, which isn’t fair with their power,” he said. “They explicitly moved him without a valid basis, claiming it was for safety and traffic.”

Published on September 11, 2018 at 9:46 pm

Contact Jordan: jallen15@syr.edu