U.S. JUDGE DECLARES D.C. CURFEW LAW UNCONSTITUTIONAL

A federal judge permanently barred District officials yesterday from enforcing a controversial curfew for juveniles, ruling that the proposed law would make "thousands of this city's innocent juveniles prisoners at night in their homes."

The opinion that the curfew is unconstitutional, issued by U.S. District Judge Charles R. Richey, was the final word on an emergency 90-day curfew approved April 4 by the D.C. Council and signed April 14 by Mayor Marion Barry.

Richey had temporarily halted enforcement of the curfew April 24 in response to legal challenges filed by the local office of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Claude E. Bailey, spokesman for the D.C. corporation counsel's office, said it was "too early to tell" whether the city would appeal.

The curfew is part of a District effort to slow drug trafficking and violent crime among the city's juveniles by limiting their movements at night. With some exceptions, it would have made it illegal for anyone under 18 to be on the streets between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. during the week, and between midnight and 6 a.m. on weekends.

The drive to pass and enforce a curfew has been led by council member Frank Smith Jr. (D-Ward 1). But the council's first attempt to do so -- a curfew that exempted only juveniles traveling between home and work -- was struck down by Richey in March.

Council members then recast the law to allow four more exceptions: juveniles accompanied by a parent, those returning home from an activity sponsored by a school, religious or nonprofit group, those traveling in a motor vehicle and those on an emergency errand for a child or parent.

But not even the new version survived the scrutiny of the judge. Richey said the curfew remained an unconstitutional infringement on juveniles' First Amendment freedom of association.

"The right to walk the streets, or to meet publicly with one's friends . . . and to do so whenever one pleases is an integral component of life in a free and ordered society," Richey wrote. The curfew, he added, "casts these rights aside like so much straw."

In addition, the judge said, the law drew an impermissible distinction between the rights of minors and the rights of adults, and was so broadly written that it violated the rights of law-abiding juveniles without addressing the problems it was meant to solve.

To work, he wrote, the curfew must "assume that those juveniles who currently leave their homes at night to engage in drug trafficking . . . will be deterred from doing so by the existence of a curfew law. The naivete of such an assumption is striking."

His order noted that, of the 26 juveniles killed in the District in 1988 -- of a total of 372 homicides -- there was no proof that any of them had been killed at a time or place that would have been affected by a curfew. In fact, Richey added, 13 of the killings occurred in the victims' homes.

In addition to the emergency law at issue in yesterday's ruling, the D.C. Council also passed similar curfew requirements on District youths in the form of temporary legislation in early April.

That legislation, which will take effect in mid-June unless Congress vetoes it, is identical to the 90-day curfew, except that it would remain in effect for 255 days, said Bailey.

The validity of the 255-day curfew law was not addressed in Richey's ruling, and it was unclear what the District's next move would be. Bailey said it was "a possibility" that District officials would not seek to enforce the second statute, but that no decision on that had been made.

ACLU spokesman Arthur B. Spitzer said his group would challenge the second curfew law, too, if the District tried to enforce it.

"This curfew law is in no way a solution to the problem of crime and drugs, it's just a political reaction to that problem," Spitzer said. "Civil liberties are always in danger when a community perceives it's in a crisis."

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