What is the justification for curfew laws? It's Halloween, and some municipalities are creating curfew laws intended to prevent people under 18 from being in public during the late night hours, for example South Brunswick, NJ. It seems like this apparently common sort of ordinance could be considered unconstitutional on multiple grounds, in that it is restricting free movement as well as targeting only a specific demographic. Here is the actual text of one such ordinance. So here are my questions: Are this and similar ordinances constitutionally valid? What defenses could a government make if challenged? Further, based on precedent, would they likely be successful?
1. Are this and similar ordinances constitutionally valid? Yes. Some future court might decide the law is invalid at some future time. But that possibility is hypothetical and speculative. Therefore, as of now, the law is valid unless and until it is challenged and overturned. 2. What defenses could a government make if challenged? It depends on what grounds the law is challenged. Your question about possible defenses is highly dependent on the nature of any challenge — which you have not specified in your question. The U.S. Constitution, for example, prohibits laws respecting a number of things such as freedom of the press, speech, religion, peaceful assembly, bearing arms, etc. to list just a few of the most notable ones. But your question does not assert the law in question violates any specific or particular prohibition against it. Although the question mentions "restricting free movement as well as targeting only a specific demographic," it does not specify any part of any constitution that prohibits these things. Therefore, your question is unclear as to what might present a constitutional problem for the law. It is also unclear which constitution you think might contain prohibitive language. Is it a federal constitutional issue that concerns you? Or is it a state constitutional matter? In either case, which issue specifically concerns you? Your question needs to address these specifics in order to analyze it and respond in a meaningful way. Look at it like this... just as it is impossible to prove a negative, so is it impossible for anyone to conclude with absolute certainty that any law is not unconstitutional because no one can predict with certainty every possible future challenge a law might face. There are just too many possibilities to (pre-emptively) exhaust them all with certainty. Also, no one can predict with certainty how any future court might rule on the future challenges (which themselves are unpredictable as previously argued). Therefore, one can only say I think the law is unconstitutional and here are my reasons. Then others can analyze the law and the reasons; then offer an opinion. Further, based on precedent, would they likely be successful? See above answer to question numbered 2. Laws aren't required to be "justified" by the constitution. Constitutional justification for a law is a meaningless phrase. There is no requirement for a law to be "justified" by any constitution other than that the legislature is empowered by the constitution to make laws. That's all the justification any law needs. Beyond that, however, no law can violate the constitution as determined by a Supreme Court (or the last court to rule) if challenged.
The UK has particularly strong (indirect) restrictions on self defense. Askthe.police.uk appears to be an official police agency. As a police agency, they can only give their version of what the law is, but they could be mistaken. They say "The only fully legal self defence product at the moment is a rape alarm". This by itself does not mean that pepper spray and the like are definitively illegal: There are other self defence products which claim to be legal (e.g. non toxic sprays), however, until a test case is brought before the court, we cannot confirm their legality or endorse them. If you purchase one you must be aware that if you are stopped by the police and have it in your possession there is always a possibility that you will be arrested and detained until the product, it's contents and legality can be verified. One can infer that they somewhat disapprove of pepper spray: There are products which squirt a relatively safe, brightly coloured dye (as opposed to a pepper spray). A properly designed product of this nature, used in the way it is intended, should not be able to cause an injury. The underlying theory seems to be that the dye will frighten the assailant so it might be useful. Nevertheless, they do not fully endorse spray dye: However, be aware that even a seemingly safe product, deliberately aimed and sprayed in someone's eyes, would become an offensive weapon because it would be used in a way that was intended to cause injury. This underscores the point that "intent" determines the criminal nature of the act. If you accidentally spray a dye into someone's eyes, that probably would not make the thing an offensive weapon. Moreover, if at the moment of defending yourself with dye you intentionally spray it into someone eyes, that does not make it an offensive weapon (see below on per se offensive weapons). The difference between pepper spray and dye lies in the outcome that you expect, that pepper spray will cause actual and non-trivial physical discomfort, and it's foreseeability (the point of having pepper spray is to injure). The police are not making any definitive "rulings" (only a court can make a ruling), and they warn The above advice is given in good faith, you must make your own decision and this website cannot be held responsible for the consequences of the possession, use or misuse of any self defence product. Possession of other weapons (mostly knives, also weapons for beating people) is more clearly illegal, due to numerous acts enacted by Parliament over the years. The gov't. prosecutor offers useful details on their (current) policies and the underlying laws. The underlying authority for these restrictions seems to be the Prevention of Crime Act, 1953, which outlaws having an offensive weapon in a public place, and an offense weapon is simply defined as any article made or adapted for use for causing injury to the person, or intended by the person having it with him for such use by him A brick or an egg could be an "offensive weapon", if a person intends to use it to cause injury. It is more difficult to see how an egg could cause injury, but actual injury is not required under the law, only intent to injure. It is thus a bit surprising that the police would be so bold as to say that a "rape alarm" is fully legal, but this may refer to a specific thing, the "Personal Guardian", which silently notifies the police, and is not a loud whistle (which could injure a person). Intent being crucial to the determination of "offensive weapon" status, CPS points out that where a person uses an article offensively in a public place, the offensive use of the article is not conclusive of the question whether he had it with him as an offensive weapon within section 1(1) of the Prevention of Crime Act 1953. If you use a chain or stick offensively, that does not establish that you had it with you as an offensive weapon. You crucially had to previously intend to use it as an offensive weapon: as they say: Having an article innocently will be converted into having the article guiltily if an intent to use the article offensively is formed before the actual occasion to use violence has arisen. There are a number of per se offensive weapons: those made for causing injury to the person i.e. offensive per se. For examples of weapons that are offensive per se, see Criminal Justice Act 1988 (Offensive Weapons) Order 1988, (Stones 8-22745) and case law decisions. (Archbold 24-116). The Criminal Justice Act (1988) (Offensive Weapons) (Amendment) Order 2008 came into force on 6th April 2008 with the effect that a sword with a curved blade of 50cm or more (samurai sword), has been added to the schedule to the Criminal Justice Act 1988 (Offensive Weapons) Order 1988 but sticks and chains would not be included. Spices are not likely to be shown to have a per se purpose of causing injury to others; but carrying pepper powder with the intent of throwing it in someone's eyes (for whatever reason) and thus injuring them fits the definition of "offensive weapon". Pepper spray even more clearly fits that definition (you don't use pepper spray in curry), and has resulted in arrests. In fact, the Firearms Act 1968 (S5) (b) specifically makes it illegal to possess any weapon of whatever description designed or adapted for the discharge of any noxious liquid, gas or other thing
The law was first promulgated on June 8, 1940 By the 76th Congress. The original text is here. It doesn’t seem to be a particularly important piece of legislation and I can find commentary on it and I’m not going to read the debates - if you do, please get back to us. Two points to note, it was passed at a time when most of the rest of the world was at war and the US was quietly preparing to be at war and it seems to be intended to fill a gap in state law since conviction under state law is a defence under Federal.
Edit: I didn't notice a that this question was tagged for Canada; this answer is based on U.S. law. "Must you stop walking" and "can the police detain you for leaving" are different questions. Must you stop? I'd expect a lot of variation from state to state, but there are definitely situations in which you must stop. In Ohio, for instance, an officer who "reasonably suspects" that that you have committed, are committing, will commit, or have witnessed the commission of violent felony, is permitted to stop you and ask for your name, address and date of birth, and it is a crime to refuse to provide that information. R.C. 2921.29. But at the moment the officer asks you to stop, you're in a tricky position. If you haven't done anything wrong, you'd be inclined to think that the officer has no basis to stop you and that you're justified in walking away. But if someone just called the police and said someone fitting your description just robbed a store two blocks away, the officer has reasonable suspicion that you committed a violent felony, but you have no way of knowing that. This sort of thing happens pretty much all the time. In the absence of that reasonable suspicion, though, Ohio courts have repeatedly held that it is not obstruction for you to just walk away (or even run!) from the officer. Can the police detain you for walking away? Obviously, if you're in a situation where it is a crime to not answer questions, the police can detain you because they just watched you break the law. But what about when you're within your rights not to answer? The police can still detain you with a Terry stop when they have a reasonable and articulable suspicion that you are committing a crime, or that you just did, or that you're about to. And they can continue that Terry stop until that suspicion is confirmed or dispelled, or until they can't reasonably expect to get anymore information by detaining you. Based on the facts you described, it seems unlikely that they could legally detain you based on your termination of the conversation. Still, I imagine that there could be circumstances where they might stop someone, ask questions, and then reasonably suspect that the person was engaged in a crime based on his decision to walk away, especially if the person hasn't explicitly invoked his Fifth Amendment right to silence.
I'll use Washington state as my source, but laws will be similar in other states. RCW 9A.76.020 outlaws obstructing a law enforcement officer, which this would be: it is a gross misdemeanor. In using lethal force, you would have committed first degree murder, under RCW 9A.32.030. There is a defense that can be used, per RCW 9A.16.050, that homicide is justified when: In the lawful defense of the slayer, or his or her husband, wife, parent, child, brother, or sister, or of any other person in his or her presence or company, when there is reasonable ground to apprehend a design on the part of the person slain to commit a felony or to do some great personal injury to the slayer or to any such person, and there is imminent danger of such design being accomplished. Law enforcement officers have access to justifiable homicide defenses as well under 9A.16.040, for example (b) When necessarily used by a peace officer to overcome actual resistance to the execution of the legal process, mandate, or order of a court or officer, or in the discharge of a legal duty or (c) When necessarily used by a peace officer or person acting under the officer's command and in the officer's aid: (i) To arrest or apprehend a person who the officer reasonably believes has committed, has attempted to commit, is committing, or is attempting to commit a felony The outcome of the case would hinge in part on whether the officer's arrest and use of force was lawful. To take two extremes, if the guy on the ground had just killed a dozen people and was aiming to rack up another dozen kills, the officer's arrest would almost certainly be held to be legal and his degree of force justified. Your personal belief that the suspect was compliant and unarmed might be refuted by the facts. On the other hand, if the guy on the ground had slept with the officer's sister and the officer wanted to rid the world of this vermin, then the arrest and force would almost certainly be held to be not legal. It can be legal to use deadly force to resist unlawful arrest. See John Bad Elk v. United States, 177 U.S. 529, where the court held that if a party resisted arrest by an officer without warrant, and who had no right to arrest him, and if, in the course of that resistance, the officer was killed, the offence of the party resisting arrest would be reduced from what would have been murder, if the officer had had the right to arrest, to manslaughter The court also said where the officer is killed in the course of the disorder which naturally accompanies an attempted arrest that is resisted, the law looks with very different eyes upon the transaction when the officer had the right to make the arrest from what it does if the officer had no such right. What might be murder in the first case might be nothing more than manslaughter in the other, or the facts might show that no offense had been committed. This ruling has been somewhat eroded, in US v. Simon: We recognize that law enforcement officers are frequently called on to make arrests without warrants and should not be held, so far as their personal security is concerned, to a nicety of distinctions between probable cause and lack of probable cause in differing situations of warrantless arrests. It is for this reason we believe that the force of John Bad Elk has been diminished The upshot of this is that (assuming no warrant), leeway is granted to officers in assessing probable cause (I'm not sure anybody really knows at a general conceptual level what constitutes "probable cause". The court seems to imply that the remote hearsay used as the basis for the arrest would not have been sufficient for a warrant, but it was "reasonable grounds" for believing accused had committed a crime). Your premise that the officer is about to shoot would have to be substantiated by some fact, such as a declaration "I'm gonna kill you". Otherwise, your belief that the officer was about to commit unjustified murder would itself be unjustified. With better fleshing out of the circumstances, you could manufacture a justified-homicide scenario.
I think you're being confused by two separate definitions of &quot;police power.&quot; The police power under the 10th Amendment has nothing to do with &quot;the police,&quot; i.e. people with guns and badges and uniforms who make arrests. It refers to the authority of a government to make rules for the general welfare. Police power is almost always exercised by the legislature, and when the executive exercises it (e.g. by issuing regulations) it's typically operating under conditions set by the legislature. The United States has police power in a few situations: DC, federal property and territories, US-flagged ships on the high seas, etc. Outside of those situations, the United States instead has enumerated powers. Congress has a power to tax and spend to promote the general welfare, but otherwise it can only legislate to achieve one of the enumerated powers in the Constitution. Now, courts have read Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce very broadly, but there does need to be some relation to enumerated powers. You're asking about the Capitol Police, but they don't have &quot;police power&quot; in the 10th Amendment sense. They have the power to carry guns and to arrest people for crimes committed against the United States. This power is limited based on geography and/or the nature of their task; for instance, they have nationwide arrest powers &quot;[i]n the performance of their protective duties,&quot; but not when they're traveling outside DC on other official duties (e.g. to attend training). While there's no litigation I can dig up that's directly on point, courts have repeatedly ruled that Congress has the power to do some not-entirely-legislative tasks in order to protect its own functions. For instance, in Anderson v. Dunn (1821), the Supreme Court upheld an inherent power of the House to hold private citizens in contempt of Congress for disobeying its subpoenas and for the Sergeant at Arms to arrest them and bring them before the House. It seems likely Congress would also have the authority to protect its own members from physical violence. The GAO did an analysis when it was analyzing whether there was a constitutional problem with making Capitol Police IG personnel into special deputy US marshals, and it concluded that there was no issue with congressional employees exercising arrest powers in order to physically protect the legislative branch.
tl;dr No, it won't be a viable defense. Background Touch has an established interpretation at common law. The common law is judge-made law. If an offense involving touch existed at common law, then the meaning of touch is "defined" by the judicial opinions themselves. As the comments have noted, you'll be able to find hundreds of years worth of opinions where judges have, by example, determined what qualifies as touching. Putting your hand on someone, yes. Spitting on someone, yes. Blowing from a distance, no. These examples make up the common law definition of touch. But how, you may ask, would the common law evolve to include new information? The answer is clear. Say Jill purposely hits Jack in the face with a shovel. When appearing before the judge, she says, "we have a new understanding of atomic proximity, so technically the atoms in the shovel never made contact with the atoms in Jack!" The judge will say, "that's interesting, but it seems irrelevant to what we're trying to accomplish with the law: Jack still had to go to the hospital. Judgment for Jack." Now the common law has incorporated the new information (...at Jill's expense). Touch isn't defined at the atomic level when interpreting a statute. Some offenses are defined, not by judges, but by statutes enacted by legislatures. If the language in the statute is ambiguous, courts have to interpret its meaning. This is often done by looking at the purpose of the statute or by looking at the plain meaning of the language. Statutory interpretation: purpose Where a court does not employ the plain meaning approach, it will often look for evidence of the drafter's intent. In this case, the court would ask what the purpose of a law like battery is. They'd probably conclude it has to do with preventing harm and offense. In fact, they probably included things like that in the statute itself. So they'd wonder if defining contact at an atomic level would help to prevent harm and offense; that seems unlikely. In so doing, the court may analyze the legislative history. It may look at events that happened around the time the law was enacted: did the legislature propose it because people were hitting each others' faces with shovels? It might even appeal to the state of the common law at the time the statute was enacted for the proper definition. Statutory interpretation: plain meaning First, it might help to look at an example from District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008). There the Court was tasked with interpreting some Second Amendment text. In doing so it said, "we are guided by the principle that '[t]he Constitution was written to be understood by the voters; its words and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary as distinguished from technical meaning.' Normal meaning may of course include an idiomatic meaning, but it excludes secret or technical meanings." Id at 576-77. Statutory interpretation also makes use of this plain meaning approach. As stated by the Court, "where the language of an enactment is clear, and construction according to its terms does not lead to absurd or impracticable consequences, the words employed are to be taken as the final expression of the meaning intended.” United States v. Missouri Pacific R.R., 278 U.S. 269, 278 (1929); see also Black's Law Dictionary (10th ed. 2014). This is bolstered by the practice of explicitly defining words with technical meanings in a definitions section of the statute. For example, Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code employs a number of terms in a technical sense, and 9-102(a) defines 81 words that are intended to take on a technical meaning. Another example is the Illinois battery statute, 720 ILCS 5: Sec. 12-3. Battery. (a) A person commits battery if he or she knowingly without legal justification by any means (1) causes bodily harm to an individual or (2) makes physical contact of an insulting or provoking nature with an individual. The statute doesn't have a technical definition for "physical contact." So under plain meaning we'd construe it in its common sense. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary (a favorite of U.S. courts) defines touch as, "to bring a bodily part into contact with especially so as to perceive through the tactile sense." That definition implies that tactile sensation is what triggers (2), not any atomic concept of proximity. If you're interested in further reading, proper interpretation of the term "physical contact" came up in the insurance contract setting in Mount Vernon Fire Ins. Co. v. Busby, 219 Cal. App. 4th 876 (2013). united-states
The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution does not prohibit people with no affiliation with the government from trying to convert people to their religion in a way not endorsed by a government official or agency. It could be that there is some content neutral prohibition on strangers accosting young school children if that person is so persistent that it amounts to content neutral harassment, or that the person might actually be a sex offender prohibited from contacting children. But, the facts of the question don't seem to compel this conclusion. Even if it violates any law to do this, it is not a violation of the U.S. Constitution.