ST. LOUIS, April 18 – Yesterday, United States District Eastern District of Missouri Judge Rodney W. Sippel ruled that the city of Florissant unconstitutionally restricted M. Christine Breden Koetter’s right to free speech by requiring her to remove a political sign from her yard in November 2010. The city of Florissant is responsible for paying her damages, attorneys’ costs and fees. Ms. Breden Koetter was represented by Anthony Rothert and Grant Doty, attorneys with the American Civil Liberties of Eastern Missouri.
“We challenged the city of Florissant’s ordinance regarding the duration, time, size, and number limitations for political yard signs, and the specialized enforcement mechanism for political signs, which allowed the mayor to order signs removed from yards,” said Rothert, legal director for the ACLU-EM.
“In election years, yard signs pop up as predictably as dandelions,” says Brenda L. Jones, executive director of the ACLU-EM. “Local governments can’t infringe on this free speech right by treating political signs different from other types of commercial yard signs.”
The ACLU suit reinforced the fact that local governments also cannot:
- limit the time a political sign is posted on a resident’s property, even if the issue is not current or the election has passed;
- require a fee to post a sign; or
- impose unreasonable limits on sign size, placement from curb or number of signs posted per yard.