City of Wichita v. Trotter

475 P.3d 365
CourtCourt of Appeals of Kansas
DecidedSeptember 25, 2020
Docket121125
StatusPublished
Cited by2 cases

This text of 475 P.3d 365 (City of Wichita v. Trotter) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals of Kansas primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
City of Wichita v. Trotter, 475 P.3d 365 (kanctapp 2020).

Opinion

No. 121,125

IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF THE STATE OF KANSAS

CITY OF WICHITA, Appellee,

v.

ARLANDO TROTTER, Appellant.

SYLLABUS BY THE COURT

1. A challenged regulatory framework comes before the court cloaked in a presumption of constitutionality. This means that appellate courts presume statutes and ordinances are constitutional and must resolve all doubts in favor of their validity. The party asserting a constitutional claim must prove the law clearly violates the Constitution.

2. Whether an ordinance violates the Constitution presents a question of law over which an appellate court exercises plenary review.

3. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits governments from passing laws that impermissibly abridge the freedom of speech. Although the Constitution only references "speech," courts have interpreted the First Amendment broadly to apply to freedom of expression, including musical and other artistic expression.

1 4. Governmental restrictions that do not regulate the content of expression but instead govern the time, place, and manner that expression may occur will be upheld if they are justified without reference to the content of the regulated speech, are narrowly tailored to serve a significant governmental interest, and leave open ample channels for communication of the expression.

5. Although time-place-and-manner regulations must be narrowly tailored to serve a significant governmental interest, narrow tailoring in this context does not demand that a regulation be the least restrictive or least intrusive means of achieving the government's end. Instead, such a regulation will stand if it promotes a substantial government interest that would be achieved less effectively absent the regulation.

6. When a government imposes a content-neutral licensing framework that preemptively impacts the time, place, and manner of free expression, it must satisfy two additional criteria. First, there must be narrowly drawn, reasonable, and definite standards to guide the licensor's discretion in granting or denying a license. And second, there must be a reasonable and meaningful framework for appealing any adverse determination.

7. The proscription against vague directives is rooted in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and in separation-of-powers principles. To survive a vagueness challenge, a law must define the criminal offense with sufficient definiteness that ordinary people can understand what conduct is prohibited and in a manner that does not encourage arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.

2 8. An ordinance is constitutionally overbroad if it makes conduct punishable that under some circumstances is constitutionally protected from criminal sanctions. Because almost every law is potentially applicable to constitutionally protected acts, a successful challenge based on overbreadth can be made only when (1) the protected activity is a significant part of the law's target and (2) there exists no satisfactory method of severing that law's constitutional from its unconstitutional applications.

9. Municipalities have broad police powers to enact ordinances regulating or restricting certain activities to promote the health, safety, and welfare of the public. An exercise of the police power is valid if it bears a real and substantial relation to the public health, safety, morals, or general welfare of the public and is not unreasonable or arbitrary.

10. When a defendant challenges the sufficiency of the evidence in a criminal case, appellate courts review the entire record in a light most favorable to the charging authority to determine whether a rational fact-finder could have found the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. For the evidence to be sufficient, there must be some evidence supporting each element of the crime.

11. Prosecutors are not permitted to misstate the law. But a prosecutor may discuss the contours of contested facts and apply those facts to the law provided in the district court's instructions to the jury.

3 12. An appellate court reviews a district court's response to a mid-deliberation question by the jury for an abuse of discretion and only finds error when no reasonable person would agree with the district court's position.

Appeal from Sedgwick District Court; JEFFREY SYRIOS, judge. Opinion filed September 25, 2020. Affirmed.

Kevin J. Zolotor, of O'Hara & O'Hara LLC, of Wichita, for appellant.

Jan Jarman, assistant city attorney, and Jennifer Magana, city attorney, for appellee.

Before WARNER, P.J., MALONE and BRUNS, JJ.

WARNER, J.: The First Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the government from abridging our freedom of expression. But that freedom is not absolute. In particular, courts have long recognized that as long as the government does not tell us what we can or cannot say, it may nevertheless regulate when, where, and how our expression may occur. That is, if the government satisfies certain safeguards inherent in the Constitution, it may impose content-neutral restrictions limiting the time, place, and manner in which our speech can take place.

This case provides a concrete illustration of these principles. The City of Wichita has adopted an ordinance requiring anyone who wishes to operate an "entertainment establishment" to first obtain a license from the City. These licensing requirements are triggered by someone's decision to provide entertainment to the public, though they do not govern the content of the entertainment a person may provide. Anyone with a license must comply with restrictions based on noise level, hours of operation, building capacity, safety, and security.

4 A Wichita jury found Arlando Trotter had violated these provisions by operating an unlicensed club. On appeal, he challenges the constitutionality of Wichita's licensing framework, claiming it impermissibly restricts his expressive conduct and requires governmental approval before he may engage in that expression. We find the ordinance to be a permissible restriction on the time, place, and manner in which people may offer entertainment to the public. After carefully reviewing the parties' constitutional arguments and Trotter's additional claims, we affirm.

FACTUAL AND PROCEDURAL BACKGROUND

The Wichita Municipal Code requires anyone who wishes to operate an "entertainment establishment"—that is, a person or entity that provides entertainment (or a venue for entertainment)—to first obtain a license from the City. Wichita Municipal Ordinance (W.M.O.) 3.30.020; W.M.O. 3.30.030. The Code defines "entertainment" as including "any single event, a series of events, or an ongoing activity or business, . . . to which the public is invited or allowed to watch, listen, or participate, or is conducted for the purposes of holding the attention of, gaining the attention of, or diverting or amusing patrons." W.M.O. 3.30.020. It also lists a number of activities covered by this provision, such as dancing to live or recorded music, playing music provided by a disc jockey (DJ), and presenting live music or other live performances. See W.M.O. 3.30.020.

Though an establishment must obtain a license to provide this entertainment, the Code does not "regulate or restrict the type or content" of the entertainment provided. W.M.O. 3.30.010. In other words, it does not require certain music to be played or ban other artistic expression. Instead, the Code regulates establishments generally, requiring them to meet certain capacity specifications and to comply with laws regarding security, controlled substances, alcohol, activities that constitute a public nuisance, and noise levels. See W.M.O. 3.30.120; W.M.O.

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Related

City of Wichita v. Trotter
494 P.3d 178 (Court of Appeals of Kansas, 2021)
State v. Letterman
492 P.3d 1196 (Court of Appeals of Kansas, 2021)

Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
475 P.3d 365, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/city-of-wichita-v-trotter-kanctapp-2020.