U.S. JUDGE UPSETS NEW YORK LAW ON GRANTING PERMITS FOR PARADES

NEW YORK -- A federal judge struck down New York City's law governing
permits for parades and rallies Monday, saying it was unconstitutional
because it lacked firm guidelines for when police must respond to requests
for permits.

Judge Leonard Sand of U.S. District Court in Manhattan ruled that the city
law violated First Amendment guarantees of free speech because, without
safeguards like specific time limits for a response to applications, the
law does not sufficiently restrict the risk of censorship by city officials.

The decision came in a case brought by a group called the Million Marijuana
March Organization, which had applied unsuccessfully for a parade permit
early this year to lobby for decriminalizing marijuana use.

The decision is the third by a federal judge in the last four months that
has faulted the Giuliani administration's handling of parade permits.

Previous court rulings on such permits took issue with the way the city had
applied the law. Sand's ruling Monday was the first to declare the law
itself unconstitutional.

The latest decision came as New York was honoring Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio,
with a parade up lower Broadway that was planned and approved within just a
few days last week. Sand, who made no reference to Monday's event in his
29-page decision, said the fundamental defect of the city's approach was
that, without time limits, the city had complete control over how quickly
it chose to respond to requests for permits. He said the Police Department
sometimes granted such requests rapidly, while other applicants, like the
marijuana-march organizers, often endured months of delays.

The judge said he was "particularly troubled" by extensive delays in the
Police Department's handling of two requests earlier this year for parades
to protest police brutality.

"A scheme such as this one, where the Police Department may routinely grant
applications either immediately or only after extensive delays, is
dangerous precisely because it lacks consistency and predictability," Sand
wrote.

"The absence of standards, whether in the text of the statute or by the
creation of consistent practice," the judge continued, "hinders a reviewing
court's ability to determine whether content-based considerations have
infected the permit application process and results in a danger of
censorship that the First Amendment does not tolerate."

The case involved a request filed last January by Robert MacDonald, a
member of the Million Marijuana March Organization, for a permit to hold a
parade from Washington Square Park up Fifth Avenue to 96th Street on May 2
of this year. After the Police Department failed to respond to the permit
request for two months, MacDonald filed his lawsuit on April 1. The city
denied the permit six days later, offering an alternative route, said
MacDonald's lawyer, Richard Wilson. The parade never took place.

In the suit, MacDonald argued that the permit law was unconstitutional
because it represented a prior restraint on speech. Sand ruled in June
against two of MacDonald's claims, saying that the city's law did not put
excessive discretion in the hands of the police commissioner and that it
did not restrict free speech based on the speech's content.

But Sand had reserved decision in June on MacDonald's third assertion: that
the absence of time limits for the Police Department's response to parade
applications risks the indefinite suspension of permissible speech.

In his ruling Monday, the judge analyzed 30 parade requests in the last two
years. He said that in most instances, police gave a timely response to
applications. But he also noted a half-dozen instances in which groups
filed requests months before a planned event, only to receive a response
from police a day or two before the scheduled parade.

Sand said he was particularly troubled by the Police Department's handling
of two marches to protest police brutality.

A group called the Coalition Against Police Brutality was denied a request
to parade on March 30, the day before the planned event, the judge said.

In the other case, a group called the October 22nd Coalition waited more
than a month for police to reject its application to march against police
misconduct on Oct. 22. The group filed a lawsuit, and Judge John Martin Jr.
of U.S. District Court in Manhattan ordered the city to grant the parade
permit, saying the delay in responding to the application was
"unconscionable" and gave rise to the inference that the delay was caused
by the content of the group's message.

City officials declined to respond to Monday's decision.

Marilyn Mode, a spokeswoman for Police Commissioner Howard Safir, said, "We
have just received Judge Sand's decision, and we're reviewing it."