The Pentagon's right to ban demonstrators from military bases was upheld by the Supreme Court on Wednesday.
The high court voted unanimously this week to keep protestors off military grounds, in a push written by Chief Justice John Roberts. The measure was first brought to the judges after demonstrator John Dennis Apel, who was previously banned from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, argued his First Amendment rights allowed him to protest on military grounds.
But the Obama administration adamantly insisted that the government could keep Apel off of the base, after he allegedly committed acts of trespassing in vandalism in 2007 and 2003, USA Today reported.
The 63-year-old man has spent the last 17 years demonstrating against the base's use of space-based artillery and missiles. Apel was found guilty of trespassing and vandalism after he put his own blood on the entrance sign at Vandenberg in 2003.
He was convicted once more four years later and banned from the base, USA Today reported. But he returned in 2010 for three additional protests in the area designated for demonstrations near the main gate at Vandenberg. He was arrested and removed from the premises on each occasion, and received a $355 fine for his actions.
Apel then sued and lost two times in lower federal courts before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals granted him a reversal on grounds that the U.S. government couldn't claim sole rights on the protest area at Vandenberg.
Apel's case brought forth the question of whether the military could trump Constitutional law on land it owns in conjunction with local and state governments.
Attorney for Apel Erwin Chemerinsky told the court that his client's right to free speech was being compromised during this week's hearing.
"This court has never said there's a permanent forfeiture of First Amendment rights because somebody misbehaved at one time," Chemerinsky, who works as the dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law, said.
But the judges maintained that the government can do whatever it sees fit with the land it owns.
"They're entitled to have it both ways," Justice Antonin Scalia stated. "It's their base."
"You can raise it, but we don't have to listen to it," Scalia concluded, in reference to the First Amendment.
