Federal Court Backs Florida on Law Against Riots, Reversing Previous Ruling

Police take aim with riot guns after a smoke grenade was thrown at them by protesters on the fourth day of the summit to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas, in Miami, Fla., on Nov. 20, 2003. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

A U.S. appeals court has backed the state of Florida on a law that expanded the definition of a riot, ruling that a lower court that interpreted the law as potentially applying to peaceful protesters was wrong.

The law says that a person riots if he or she “willfully participates in a violent public disturbance involving an assembly of three or more persons, acting with a common intent to assist each other in violent and disorderly conduct” that results in injury to another person, damage to property, or imminent danger of either.

The definition of riot in the 2020 law—officially titled the Combatting Violence, Disorder, and Looting, and Law Enforcement Protection Act—was deemed too vague by U.S. District Judge Mark Walker. The federal judge in 2021 blocked the law as a lawsuit against it proceeded.

“If this court does not enjoin the statute’s enforcement, the lawless actions of a few rogue individuals could effectively criminalize the protected speech of hundreds, if not thousands, of law-abiding Floridians,” he wrote at the time.

State officials appealed, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit asked the Florida Supreme Court to weigh in. The state’s top court said the law does not apply to peaceful protesters.

“With the benefit of the Florida Supreme Court’s answer to our certified question, we hold that the plaintiffs have failed to demonstrate a substantial likelihood of success on the merits of their vagueness and overbreadth challenges to the amended riot statute,” U.S. Circuit Judge Jill A. Pryor wrote on Oct. 7.

“The district court erred in concluding otherwise, and thus it abused its discretion by granting the preliminary injunction,” she added.

The appeals court reversed Walker’s order that blocked the law, and remanded the case back to Walker for further proceedings consistent with its opinion.

U.S. Circuit Judges Elizabeth L. Branch and Ed Carnes, who made up the rest of the appeals court panel that was assigned the case, joined Pryor in the unanimous ruling.

Lawyers for the state had told the appeals court that the injunction should be lifted because the law does not prohibit peaceful protest. Plaintiffs in the case, including Dream Defenders, had told the court that the law was unconstitutionally overbroad because “there is no reasonable and readily apparent reading that excludes those who merely attend protests involving violence—even if the individual neither participates nor intends to participate in the violence.“ But in light of the Florida Supreme Court’s interpretation, ”we now know that is not the case,” Pryor said.

“The statute does not broadly prohibit constitutionally protected speech. Nor does it reach the plaintiffs’ hypothetical photographing or videotaping of police officers at a violent protest, so long as the photography or videography is not intended to assist others in carrying out violence,” she wrote.

“The plaintiffs’ fear of guilt by association under the statute is also unfounded. If a protestor lacks the ‘intent to assist others in violent and disorderly conduct,’ the spontaneous violence of unrelated individuals is not enough to trigger liability under the statute.”