More than eight and a half years after Robert Norse was ejected from a City Council meeting for giving a Nazi salute, a federal appeals court in San Francisco has ordered a new trial. This offers the homeless activist a new chance to sue then-Mayor Christopher Krohn and City Council for violating his right to free speech, or in Norse’s case, free salute.
More than eight and a half years after Robert Norse was ejected from a City Council meeting for giving a Nazi salute, a federal appeals court in San Francisco has ordered a new trial. This offers the homeless activist a new chance to sue then-Mayor Christopher Krohn and City Council for violating his right to free speech, or in Norse’s case, free salute.
Norse delivered the salute after a woman was told that she could not present her case to City Council because the time for public comment was over. While the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that the comment period was over, they ruled that the meeting continued to be a “limited public forum,” and that “Norse still had a First Amendment right to be free from viewpoint discrimination at that time.”
Norse’s case had been dismissed twice before yesterday’s decision. In his last appeal, however, the judge ruled that it could be heard before an 11-judge panel. It now remains for a U.S. District Court in San Jose to decide whether Norse was ejected from the meeting because his offensive gesture was determined to be disruptive or simply the iteration of an offensive point of view. Read more at the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
