Bullock v. City of Dallas, 37745

• Decision Date: 17 September 1981
• Docket Number: No. 37745,37745
• Citation: 281 S.E.2d 613,248 Ga. 164
• Parties: BULLOCK v. CITY OF DALLAS.
• Court: Georgia Supreme Court

Page 613

281 S.E.2d 613

248 Ga. 164

BULLOCK v. CITY OF DALLAS.

No. 37745.

Supreme Court of Georgia.

Sept. 17, 1981.

Timothy A. McCreary, Howe & Sutton, Douglasville, for Gina Paige bullock.

Thomas C. Sanders, Lane & Sanders, Dallas, for City of Dallas.

MARSHALL, Justice.

The appellant was convicted in the Recorder's Court for the City of Dallas, Georgia, of the offense of loitering, in violation of city ordinance § 5-112(a): "No person shall remain or loiter upon any premises to which the public has access, including but not limited to such places as business and shopping area parking lots, where the person's presence upon such premises is unrelated to the normal activity, use or business for which such premises are made available to the public."

The evidence, briefly, was that the appellant, after getting gasoline for her car at a filling station, stopped in the parking lot of an adjacent vehicle and tire maintenance business (which was not open for business at the time) at the request of her passenger, who saw some friends in another car. The young people chatted with each other concerning a party that was to take place later that evening. The evidence was in conflict as to how long they remained there with their cars' engines still running; the appellant and the others involved testified that it was a minute or a minute and a half, whereas the arresting officer testified that he had timed it at five minutes. There was no evidence of any criminal behavior other than the alleged loitering.

The appellant argued in recorder's court that the ordinance is unconstitutional because it is unreasonable, vague and overbroad. After her conviction, she filed exceptions alleging these grounds and attacking the conviction as being contrary to the law and the evidence. On certiorari to the superior court, the conviction was affirmed. We granted the appellant's application for discretionary appeal. Code Ann. § 6-701.1(a)(1) (Ga.L.1979, pp. 619, 620). Held :

1. The anachronistic laws condemning loitering, like vagrancy statutes, are throwbacks to feudal England. See Lacey, Vagrancy and other Crimes of Personal Condition, 66 Harv.L.Rev. 1203. "The conditions which spawned these laws may be gone, but the archaic classifications remain." Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156, 162, 92 S.Ct. 839, 843, 31 L.Ed.2d 110 (1972).

The ordinance in question, although patently in contravention of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution (see Divisions 2, 3 and 4, post), is fatally defective for the reason that it is so capricious, arbitrary and unreasonable as to be void. This court has long recognized that a municipal ordinance may be declared void for unreasonableness without declaring it unconstitutional. Richardson v. Coker, 188 Ga. 170(2), 3 S.E.2d 636 (1939). This principle was applied in Soles v. City of Vidalia, 92 Ga.App. 839(2), 90 S.E.2d 249 (1955): "The ordinance for the violation of which the (appellant) was convicted making it unlawful for any person to idle, loiter or loaf on the streets, sidewalks, alleys, lanes, parks, or squares of the City of Vidalia or in any public building therein, and which makes no exception for persons thus engaged who are in no way interfering with the rights of others, who are guilty of no disorderly or obnoxious conduct, and who are engaged in no conduct resulting in impeding traffic, the congregation of persons resulting in obstruction thereof, or other such conduct that may reasonably be regulated by a municipality under its police powers is void for unreasonableness."

The inherent unreasonableness of the all-encompassing Dallas ordinance is clearly seen in its application in the case at bar. It cannot be gainsaid that the appellant committed no unlawful act or interfered with any rights of others. She merely sat in her legally parked vehicle in the parking lot of a business which was closed for the day, for a maximum of five minutes, and listened to her passenger carry on a brief, lawful conversation with the occupant of another vehicle whom they had chanced to meet. An ordinance which makes criminal such perfectly normal, acceptable, lawful, innocent and innocuous behavior, is an affront to justice and a total abberation from our concept of ordered liberties.

The city argues that the ordinance is necessary and reasonable to protect the right of the property owner or businessman who makes his parking lot available to the public in connection with the operation of his business, to use his property as he sees fit. However, the section of the ordinance in question makes no reference to interference with the property owner's use of the premises, but facially would prohibit the presence of those like the appellant, who are present after business hours, when no interference with the normal use of the property would occur. In this connection, we note that subsection (h) of § 5-112 of the ordinance addresses this type of problem by providing, "No person shall congregate with another or others in or on any public way or place so as to halt or impede the flow of vehicular or pedestrian traffic after having been directed to clear such public way or place when ordered by the City police."

2. The ordinance in question is constitutionally infirm due to its vagueness.

"No one may be required at peril of life, liberty or property to speculate as to the meaning of penal statutes. All are entitled to be informed as to what the State commands or forbids." Lanzetta v. New Jersey, 306 U.S. 451, 453, 59 S.Ct. 618, 647, 83 L.Ed. 888 (1939). "(A) statute which either forbids or requires the doing of an act in terms so vague that men of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning and differ as to its application, violates the first essential of due process of law." Connally v. General Const. Co., 269 U.S. 385, 391, 46 S.Ct. 126, 127, 70 L.Ed. 322 (1926). "(I)f arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement is to be prevented, laws must provide explicit standards for those who apply them. A vague law impermissibly delegates basic policy matters to policemen, judges, and juries for resolution on an ad hoc and subjective basis ..." Grayned v. City of Rockford, 408 U.S. 104, 108, 92 S.Ct. 2294, 2299, 33 L.Ed.2d 222 (1972). Under our democratic system of government, lawmaking is not entrusted to the moment-to-moment opinions of a policeman on his beat. To let a policeman's command become equivalent to a criminal statute comes dangerously close to making our government one of men rather than laws. See Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham, 382 U.S. 87, 90, 86 S.Ct. 211, 213, 15 L.Ed.2d 176 (1965). Vagrancy-loitering ordinances, as carryovers from the feudal ages, tend to be inherently vague so as to allow law enforcement officials to throw as large a net as possible to rid the public of undesirables. However, "(t)o the extent the statute can be interpreted to support dragnet, street-sweeping operations absent probable cause of actual criminality, it conflicts with established notions of due process." U. S. ex rel. Newsome v. Malcolm, 492 F.2d 1166, 1173 (2nd Cir. 1974).

Perhaps the leading case in this area is Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156, 92 S.Ct. 839, 31 L.Ed.2d 110, supra, in which the Supreme Court reversed the convictions of eight defendants for vagrancy and loitering due to the vagueness of the city ordinance, "in that it 'fails to give a person of ordinary intelligence fair notice that his contemplated conduct is forbidden by the statute,' it encourages arbitrary and erratic arrests and convictions, it makes criminal activities that by modern standards are normally innocent, and it places almost unfettered discretion in the hands of the police."

The ordinance in question must fail for the same reasons, being replete with vagueness, ambiguity and uncertainty. Broken into its component parts, it declares:

(a) "No person ..." Literally applied, this would include the property owner himself, if his presence is not related to a normal purpose for which the premises are available to the public, and also one who had express authority to be on the premises.

(b) "... shall remain or loiter ..." Without any guidelines, any citizen who desired to conform his conduct to this provision would be unable to discern whether he risked criminal responsibility for pausing momentarily in a parking lot during an early morning jog, or in changing a tire which has gone flat while shopping in a store, or "by seeking shelter from the elements in the doorway of a building." Newsome v. Malcolm, 492 F.2d 1166, supra, p. 1173. Furthermore, with no specified time for the violation, criminal liability may arise from a pause of 15 seconds, one to five minutes (as here), 15 minutes, or 5 hours apparently totally within the discretion of the police officer.

(c) "... upon any premises to which the public has access, including but not limited...