By Jim Saunders ©2024 The News Service of Florida
TALLAHASSEE — After a federal judge ruled that a prayer vigil in a town square was unconstitutional, the city of Ocala has taken a long-running lawsuit to a federal appeals court.
Attorneys for Ocala last week filed a notice that is a first step in asking the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a June 26 decision by U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan that the city violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution by organizing and carrying out the prayer vigil.
The notice, as is common, did not detail arguments the city will make at the Atlanta-based appeals court.
But the American Center for Law & Justice, a national group that is helping represent the city, said last week on its website that the “prayer vigil is consistent with Americans’ longtime tradition of government and private citizens calling and gathering for prayer during difficult times. It is a freedom that our (nation’s) Founders sought to secure, rather than prohibit, through the ratification of the First Amendment.”
“Because this case involves an issue of such great legal importance — the role of religion in American public life — seeking appellate review is necessary,” the legal group’s executive director, Jordan Sekulow, wrote in the online post.
The American Humanist Association, which represents plaintiffs who challenged the vigil, said in an online post last month that it expected the city to appeal. The association said it “is prepared to fight this case on behalf of our plaintiffs and the First Amendment until the very end.”
“We are undeterred by an appeal and will continue to fight in this case to protect the line that separates religion from government in our secular democracy. The other side — and others who would consider violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment — should continue to expect fierce resistance from us in court,” Lily Bolourian, legal and policy director for the American Humanist Association, said in the July 19 post.
The vigil was held Sept. 24, 2014, amid a spate of shootings in the Ocala area. Plaintiffs Art Rojas, Lucinda Hale, Daniel Hale and Frances Jean Porgal filed the lawsuit in November 2014 after attending the vigil, according to court documents. It named as defendants the city, then-Ocala Mayor Kent Guinn and then-Police Chief Greg Graham, who died in 2020.
In his 50-page ruling this summer, Corrigan wrote that the idea for the vigil came from a meeting at the Ocala Police Department and was “advertised, and completed through the actions of the mayor, the chief of police and the Ocala Police Department, including its employees and staff.”
“If individuals or religious groups had organized a prayer vigil and gathered in the downtown square in the city of Ocala to pray for an end to violent crime (even with law enforcement attending), the First Amendment to the United States Constitution would have protected the ‘free exercise’ of their religion,” Corrigan wrote. “But because the city conceived, organized, promoted, and conducted the prayer vigil, it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.”
Corrigan in 2018 also ruled that the vigil was unconstitutional, but the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2022 directed him to reconsider the case. That directive came after a U.S. Supreme Court opinion supported a Bremerton, Wash., high-school football coach who lost his job after praying on the field following games.
But in the June ruling, Corrigan said the facts of the case involving the football coach are “far different from those here.”
In addition to the idea for the vigil originating from a meeting in Graham’s office, Corrigan wrote that the police department promoted the event in a letter posted on Facebook and with a flyer that included an image or praying hands. He also wrote that uniformed Ocala Police Department chaplains were among the people on the stage during the vigil.
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