The Law of Sleepful Protest: Metropolitan Council v. Safir
A group of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are relying on a 2000 injunction ordered by Judge Kimba Woods to occupy sidewalks in lower Manhattan near Wall Street. The case, Metropolitan Council v. Howard Safir, Commissioner of the New York City Police Department; Henry Stern, Commissioner of the New York City Parks Department; and the City of New York, involved a group demonstrating against NYC rent regulations who wished to spend the night on a city sidewalk in the Upper East Side.
Judge Woods determined that so long as participants were not subject to any danger and did not interfere with use of the sidewalks, the First Amendment prevented the city from restricting laying prone on or sleeping on the sidewalk. Accordingly, her order imposed the following conditions on the sleep-on-sidewalk action:
2. Particpants occupy no more than a 7.5 foot wide swath of sidewalk extending from the sidewalk's edge furthest from the street and extending in length no more than 75 feet
3. Participants not obstruct or impede access to nearby building entrances
4. Consist of no more than 25 persons.
While the restraining order only strictly applied to that year 2000 action, the order did make clear that should First Amendment rights of participants be restrained by arrest, the arrestees would not likely be able to receive any compensating vindication.
On the morning of April 16, 2011, the City of New York under the direction of Commissioner of New York City Police Department Ray Kelly, appears to have decided to test the application of state and local penal codes to the act of sleepful protest which Judge Woods deemed protected by arresting at least four participants.
UPDATE FROM LOCATION APRIL 16 10:30 PM
Reporting has revealed that the NYPD has restricted any use of the sidewalk location upon which demonstrators spent the last week sleeping on grounds that it was in a "sensitive location". The location is within two hundred yards of the New York Stock Exchange entrance and under heavy and constant police and private surveillance.
Anthony Zenkus, a social worker and college professor from Huntington, New York, who came to spend the night, said he wasn't voting. "Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, they'll probably rule the same. We live in a society now where many of us can afford to distance ourselves from the pain that others are feeling." Zenkus, citing a high poverty rate and seemingly endless foreclosures, gestured to the crowd of protesters. "Occupy is basically saying, no, you have to look."
Occupy's New "Sleepful Protest" Sits At Neighborhood Nexus
