Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
Journalists scored a victory last week when the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a block on the enforcement of Indiana’s police “buffer zone” law, intended to keep the media and public bystanders 25 feet away from a law enforcement scene.
In all honesty, the decision probably won’t stop the Legislature from passing a similar law in the future that attempts to meet constitutional muster.
But, at the very least, it will make such a proposal less objectionable to journalists and citizens who support open access.
Just months before the federal appeals court handed down its decision, the Legislature already was working to make the law more acceptable for the courts.
The 7th Circuit didn’t weigh in on the so-called “fix” approved earlier this year, noting that despite its existence the state’s attorneys insisted during arguments that it intended to enforce both the first and second versions of the law.
So the court focused on the original buffer zone law passed by the Legislature in 2023 and found it to be unconstitutionally vague.
The court said the law fails to specify what behavior by public bystanders or the media sets the stage for a violation, allowing it to be arbitrarily enforced for any reason or no reason at all.
Or, as Judge Doris Pryor so tastily put it in the majority opinion for the divided three-judge appellate panel: “The Fourteenth Amendment will not tolerate a law subjecting pedestrians to arrest merely because a police officer had a bad breakfast—no matter how bitter the coffee or how soggy the scrambled eggs.”
The court’s ruling upheld a preliminary injunction issued against the law in September by U.S. District Court Judge James Sweeney in Indianapolis.
He approved the injunction because he found the plaintiffs (several media organizations) were likely to prove the law violated the 14th Amendment.
The law would make it a misdemeanor to knowingly or intentionally approach within 25 feet of a law enforcement officer after being told to stop.
When the Legislature attempted clarify the law earlier this year, it added language that said an officer would be able to order someone to stop approaching if there was a “reasonable belief” that the person’s presence within the 25-foot zone would interfere with police duties.
But to this legal layman, even that appears to fall far short of the specificity that the appellate court demanded.
The new language focuses on a perceived threat of interference rather than actually defining specific behaviors that would trigger the 25-foot barrier.
As I said in a column earlier this year, I believe police should be able to push people back from a crime or an arrest scene if those people are truly interfering with an officer’s work.
And people who ignore these police directives probably should be charged with a crime.
But the need to protect an officer’s safety should be balanced against the rights of citizens and the media to document police work and bring attention to police abuses when they occur.
Even the revised law doesn’t get the balance quite right. It gives the police too much discretion and fails to give the media a reasonable chance to challenge a criminal charge if they are unjustifiably accused.
It’s hard to know exactly what approach might appease the courts, but that’s unlikely to stop Indiana’s Republican-dominated Legislature from trying.
Whatever the outcome, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press deserves high praise for leading six Indiana media organizations in their legal fight against the buffer zone law and setting the stage for a legal precedent that either blocks all such laws or at least prevents them from being arbitrarily applied. •
__________
Greg Weaver is editor of The Indiana Lawyer. Reach him at [email protected].
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.