Boyle v. Landry, No. 4
| Court | United States Supreme Court |
| Citation | 27 L.Ed.2d 696,401 U.S. 77,91 S.Ct. 758 |
| Docket Number | No. 4 |
| Parties | John S. BOYLE, Chief Judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, et al., Appellants, v. Lawrence LANDRY et al. Re |
| Decision Date | 23 February 1971 |
v.
Lawrence LANDRY et al.
Thomas E. Brannigan, Chicago, Ill., for appellants.
Ellis E. Reid, Chicago, Ill., for appellees.
Page 78
Mr. Justice BLACK delivered the opinion of the Court.
This action was brought in federal court by seven groups of Negro residents of Chicago, Illinois, seeking a declaratory judgment and an injunction against the enforcement of a number of Illinois statutes and Chicago ordinances on the grounds that they violated various provisions of the Federal Constitution. The complaint named as defendants and sought relief against a number of officials of Cook County and the City of Chicago: the Mayor, the Chief Judge, and two Magistrates of the Circuit Court, the State's Attorney for the county, the Sheriff, the Superintendent of Police, the city's Corporation Counsel and his assistant, and three city police officers. Their complaint challenged as invalid the Illinois statutes prohibiting mob action,1 resisting arrest, 2 aggravated assault,3 aggravated battery,4 and intimidation.5 They alleged that some of the plaintiffs had been arrested under some of these statutes and that those prosecutions were currently pending in Illinois state courts, and that Negroes were being intimidated in the exercise of their First Amendment rights (1) through the wholesale use of all the statutes alleged to be unconstitutional to prosecute members of the Negro community and (2) through the use of arrests without probable cause, coupled with the setting of exorbitant bail. The complaint contended that the defendants had threatened to enforce all of the named statutes for the sole purpose of harassing and intimidating the plaintiffs. They requested the convening of a three-judge federal court under 28 U.S.C. §§ 2281 and 2284, a declaration that the challenged statutes were unconstitutional, and
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temporary and permanent injunctions prohibiting the pending and any possible future prosecutions under the statutes in question.
The defendants answered by opposing the convening of a three-judge court and the issuance of a temporary injunction, and moved to dismiss the complaint on the grounds, among other, that (1) as to those plaintiffs against whom prosecutions were then pending, there was an adequate remedy at law in that they would be able to present their constitutional challenges to the statutes involved in the pending criminal proceedings, and that as to such plaintiffs the court was barred by 28 U.S.C. § 2283 from issuing an injunction against state court proceedings,6 and that (2) as to those plaintiffs without matters pending in the state courts, there were no facts alleged in the complaint showing that any of those plaintiffs were threatened with prosecution under any of the challenged statutes, or that they would suffer any irreparable injury...
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