By Charles Lane, The Washington Post
The Supreme Court upheld a controversial anti-crime policy in Richmond’s public housing projects today, ruling unanimously that putting the streets and sidewalks of the complexes off-limits to nonresidents does not violate the constitutional right to free speech.
Richmond’s authorities, supported in the case by public housing officials elsewhere who are also looking for new ways to contain drug-related crime, said their policy was a creative means to stop violence in low-income housing -- most of which, they said, was caused by outsiders.
But Kevin L. Hicks, who was arrested and convicted of trespassing in 1999 after defying warnings to stay off the streets and sidewalks at the drug-ridden Whitcomb Court project, had argued that the rule was too broad. Hicks and his lawyers said the rule would have the effect of preventing people such as leafletters and religious groups from exercising their right to speak inside Richmond public housing. The Virginia Supreme Court ruled 5 to 2 in Hicks’s favor.
Reversing that ruling, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that “Hicks has not shown . . . that the . . . trespass policy as a whole prohibits a ‘substantial’ amount of protected speech in relation to its many legitimate applications.”
The Bush administration had sided with Virginia in the case. The case is Virginia v. Hicks, No. 02-371.