23-Jun-17 – A Chicago ordinance prohibiting anyone, even protesters, from remaining overnight in Grant Park without a special city permit is constitutional, the Illinois Supreme Court has ruled.

The court rejected contentions from left-wing protest groups that the state constitution grants broader rights to assembly than does the United States Constitution.

The state’s high court justices ruled 6-1 on June 15 to back a state appellate court’s findings that a Cook County judge had erred in finding unconstitutional a city ordinance allowing Grant Park to “close” for seven hours each night. Closing the park allowed the city to justify police actions to block protesters from camping in Grant Park.

The case landed in the courts nearly five years ago after the City of Chicago expelled a group of protesters associated with the left-wing Occupy movement from Grant Park in October 2011.

Protests in Chicago had swelled to several thousand daily, with a sustained presence 24 hours a day on downtown city streets. On October 15, 2011, protesters announced their intent to “occupy” Grant Park. Over two successive weekends that month, however, Chicago Police Department arrested more than 300 Occupy protesters when they refused to obey repeated police orders or heed multiple warnings to leave the park hours after it “closed.”

The protesters then challenged the ordinance, saying it unconstitutionally violated their rights to assemble.

Cook County Judge Thomas More Donnelly (left) initially sided with the protesters, finding the city’s ordinance barring use of Grant Park from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. was an unconstitutional infringement on citizens’ rights under the U.S. and Illinois Constitutions. Particularly, rights of the Occupy protesters, who wished to use the park to assemble for their protests against what they believed to be injustices within the nation’s economic and political systems.

The City of Chicago appealed that ruling, arguing its ordinance was justified under the goal of allowing the city to preserve and maintain the park for public use, which they said was a legitimate government interest. The city argued the ordinance did not block the protesters from marching – only from setting up camp in Grant Park.

On appeal, the Illinois First District appellate court twice overruled Judge Donnelly, first in December 2014, and again 12 months later, after the Illinois Supreme Court ordered the panel to take another look at the case in light of the Occupy plaintiffs’ First Amendment claims.

The protesters then appealed the matter to the Illinois Supreme Court, which also upheld the city ordinance.

The justices centered their ruling on the protesters’ contentions that the Illinois Constitution grants them more expansive assembly rights than under the U.S. Constitutions, and their rights to assemble should not be subject to the same “time, place, manner” restrictions as is applied now under federal case law.

The court, however, rejected that claim.

“Because the two provisions are virtually identical in language and were intended by the drafters of the Illinois Constitution…to express the same meaning,” wrote the justices, “the right to assemble guaranteed in…the Illinois Constitution…is to be interpreted and applied in lockstep with the federal precedents interpreting and applying the assembly clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.”