City of Dallas v. MD II Entertainment, Inc.

974 S.W.2d 411, 1998 Tex. App. LEXIS 4456, 1998 WL 414290
CourtCourt of Appeals of Texas
DecidedJuly 24, 1998
DocketNo. 05-96-00794-CV
StatusPublished
Cited by3 cases

This text of 974 S.W.2d 411 (City of Dallas v. MD II Entertainment, Inc.) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals of Texas primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
City of Dallas v. MD II Entertainment, Inc., 974 S.W.2d 411, 1998 Tex. App. LEXIS 4456, 1998 WL 414290 (Tex. Ct. App. 1998).

Opinion

OPINION

MORRIS, Justice.

The question presented in this case is whether a City of Dallas ordinance permitting the police chief to suspend a business license is unconstitutional. The trial court concluded the ordinance in question, Dallas City Code section 14-10(6), is unconstitutionally vague and, as such, violates appellees’ right to due process of law. We conclude the trial court’s ruling is correct. We hold that Dallas City Code section 14-10(6) is unconstitutional.

I.

The Fare West is a dance hall featuring live “strip tease” shows. It is operated by MD II Entertainment, Inc. As a dance hall, The Fare West is subject to certain regulations and licensing requirements found in chapter 14 of the Dallas City Code.

By letter dated April 11, 1995, the Dallas chief of police informed Duncan Burch, president of MD II, that The Fare West’s dance hall license was suspended for five days. The sole reason given was that The Fare West had violated section 14-10(6) of the Dallas City Code. At the time of the suspension, section 14-10(6) read as follows:

The chief of police shall suspend a dance hall license for a period of time not exceeding 30 days if the chief of police determines that a licensee or an employee of a licensee has:
(6) demonstrated inability to operate or manage a dance hall premises in a peaceful and law abiding manner, thus [413]*413necessitating action by law enforcement officers....

After receiving notice of the suspension, appellees appealed to the City’s Permit and License Appeal Board. The Board upheld the suspension but reduced the period of suspension to two days. Appellees then filed suit in district court against the City of Dallas, the Board, and the Dallas chief of police seeking injunctive and declaratory relief. The trial court granted appellees relief by, among other things, declaring that section 14-10(6) of the Dallas City Code “is unconstitutional, vague and overbroad, denying [ap-pellees] and other parties similarly situated due process of law.” Once the trial court’s judgment became final, this appeal ensued. Appellants challenge the trial court’s conclusion that section 14-10(6) violates the constitutional protections of due process. In discussing this challenge, we refer to appellants collectively as “the City.”

II.

The City challenges the trial court's conclusion that section 14-10(6) violates the constitutional protections of due process. It argues simply that section 14-10(6) is clear in its meaning and constitutional in its enforcement. In doing so, it relies on the decision of Dumas v. City of Dallas, 648 F.Supp. 1061 (N.D.Tex.1986), and the later Fifth Circuit opinion affirming it, FW/PBS, Inc. v. City of Dallas, 837 F.2d 1298 (5th Cir.1988), aff'd in part and vacated in part, 498 U.S. 215, 110 S.Ct. 596, 107 L.Ed.2d 603 (1990).1

In Dumas, the federal district court reviewed the constitutionality of Dallas city ordinances regulating sexually oriented businesses. The court applied the four-part test set out in United States v. O’Brien, 391 U.S. 367, 88 S.Ct. 1673, 20 L.Ed.2d 672 (1968), to determine whether the ordinances were over-broad or were otherwise justified despite the fact they had an incidental effect on free expression. Dumas, 648 F.Supp. at 1069. To pass the O’Brien test, a regulation must (1) be within the constitutional power of the government, (2) further an important or substantial governmental interest, (3) be unrelated to the suppression of free expression, and (4) be no greater than essential to the furtherance of the governmental interest if the regulation incidentally restricts freedom of expression. O’Brien, 391 U.S. at 377, 88 S.Ct. 1673. The court in Dumas concluded the ordinances satisfied the first three elements of the test, but that four particular sections failed to meet the fourth element. Dumas, 648 F.Supp. at 1069, 1077.

One of the sections found unconstitutional in Dumas dealt with issuing licenses. That section contained much of the same language at issue in the case before us. It required the police chief to deny a license to a sexually oriented business on a finding that the applicant is “unable to operate or manage a sexually oriented business premises in a peaceful and law-abiding manner.” Id. at 1072. The court determined this language was not susceptible to objective measurement and, therefore, vested the police chief with unconstitutionally broad and unfettered discretion to deny a license. Id. at 1072-73. Such unfettered discretion was greater than necessary to further the government’s interest and posed an unreasonable risk that conduct protected by the First Amendment would be restricted.

In a footnote to the opinion, the court wrote that the “infirmity” suffered by the section was not repeated in a similar section [414]*414relating to license suspension. The license suspension section used the same language as the license issuance section but added the phrase “thus necessitating action by law enforcement officers.” Id. at 1072 n. 29. The court stated in its footnote that the added language limited the potential applicability of the ordinance by requiring objective indications of an inability to operate a sexually oriented business in a peaceful manner. Id. In affirming the opinion, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote generally that the ordinance sections upheld by the district court did not give the chief of police imper-missibly broad discretion in the issuing, suspending, and revoking of licenses. FW/PBS, 837 F.2d at 1305.

The City relies heavily on Dumas and FW/PBS. In effect, it argues that the issue of whether the language of section 14-10(6) violates due process has already been decided by these eases. The City’s reliance on these cases, however, is misplaced.

The issue in Dumas was not whether the language of the section violated due process, but whether the language was overbroad to the extent it permitted unnecessary infringements on protected First Amendment freedoms. Dumas, 648 F.Supp. at 1069-70. Because the phrase “inability to operate or manage a sexually oriented business in a peaceful and law-abiding manner,” standing alone, did not provide objective guidelines for enforcing the ordinance, the section permitted the chief of police to deny licenses possibly based on an applicant’s exercise of First Amendment protected rights. See Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham, 394 U.S. 147, 150-51, 89 S.Ct. 935, 22 L.Ed.2d 162 (1969). The addition of the language “thus necessitating action by law enforcement officers” arguably restricted the discretion of the chief of police to rendering licensing decisions based on demonstrably illegal, and therefore not constitutionally protected, conduct. The courts in Dumas and FW/PBS concluded, therefore, that the language of the suspension ordinance before them was not over-broad in the sense that its incidental restrictions on First Amendment freedoms were no greater than necessary to further the substantial governmental interest in regulating sexually oriented businesses. Dumas, 648 F.Supp. at 1072,1077.

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Bluebook (online)
974 S.W.2d 411, 1998 Tex. App. LEXIS 4456, 1998 WL 414290, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/city-of-dallas-v-md-ii-entertainment-inc-texapp-1998.