Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign v. King County

The Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign (SeaMAC) submitted an advertisement to run on King County Metro buses in the Seattle metropolitan area. After initially accepting the ad, the County revoked its approval, concluding that displaying the ad would likely result in vandalism and violence disruptive to the bus system. We are asked to decide whether the County’s action violated SeaMAC’s First Amendment rights.

I

King County runs Metro, a public mass transit system serving hundreds of thousands of passengers in and around Seattle each day. Metro’s mission is to provide safe and reliable transportation for its customers. Like many public transit agencies, Metro helps finance its operations through an advertising program, which allows advertisers to purchase ad space on the exterior of Metro buses.

The County runs Metro’s bus advertising program through a contract with Titan Outdoor LLC. The contract contains a policy restricting advertising content. At the time of the events leading to this appeal, that policy prohibited ads for alcohol and tobacco products; ads for adult movies, video games rated for mature audiences, and other adult products and services; ads promoting…

dissenting:

The majority and I part ways at the starting line. In my view, the district court erred by concluding that King County created only a limited public forum. The County’s policy and practice unmistakably demonstrate an intent to create a designated public forum on its Metro bus exteriors. Accordingly, the First Amendment requires that the County’s decision to restrict SeaMAC’s speech must be necessary to serve a compelling state interest and narrowly drawn; in other words, it must survive strict scrutiny. This is not to pre-judge the outcome of the case. The safety of public transit systems is of paramount importance, and it may be that credible threats created a compelling state interest. But it also may be that the County inappropriately bowed to a “heckler’s veto” and suppressed speech that should have been protected. To faithfully apply our precedent to the actual facts established by the record, we should remand for the district court to determine in the first instance whether genuine issues of material fact exist under the appropriate level of scrutiny, i.e., whether the County’s safety concerns justified cancellation of the ad.

The outcome of this dispute hinges…

FOR PUBLICATION

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

SEATTLE MIDEAST AWARENESS No. 11-35914 CAMPAIGN, a Washington non-profit corporation, D.C. No. Plaintiff-Appellant, 2:11-cv-00094-

RAJ

v.

KING COUNTY, a municipal corporation, Defendant-Appellee.

SEATTLE MIDEAST AWARENESS No. 11-35931 CAMPAIGN, a Washington non-profit corporation, D.C. No. Plaintiff-Appellee, 2:11-cv-00094-

RAJ

v.

KING COUNTY, a municipal OPINION corporation, Defendant-Appellant.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington Richard A. Jones, District Judge, Presiding 2 SEATTLE MIDEAST AWARENESS CAMPAIGN V. KING CNTY.

Argued and Submitted October 3, 2012—Spokane, Washington

Filed March 18, 2015

Before: Alex Kozinski, Morgan Christen, and Paul J. Watford, Circuit Judges.

Opinion by Judge Watford; Dissent by Judge Christen

SUMMARY*

Civil Rights

The panel affirmed the district court’s summary judgment in favor of King County, and dismissed as moot the County’s conditional cross appeal in an action brought pursuant to 42 U.S.C. §…