Tony;
From Wikipedia. The entries for Koch, Dinkins & Bloomberg do not cite any first amendment cases of note. For a former federal prosecutor, he seemed to have little understanding of our constitution and its comforts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayoralty_of_Rudy_GiulianiLitigants filed several civil liberties violations lawsuits against the mayor or the city. Giuliani\'s administration lost 22 of 26 cases. [83]
Some of the court cases which found the Giuliani administration to have violated First Amendment rights included actions barring public events from their previous location at the City Hall steps, not allowing taxi drivers to assemble for a protest, not allowing city workers to speak to the press without permission, barring church members from delivering an AIDS education program in a park, denying a permit for a march to object to police brutality, issuing summons and seizing literature of three workers collecting signatures to get a candidate on the presidential ballot, imposing strict licensing restrictions on sidewalk artists that were struck down by a court of appeals as a violation of artists\' rights, using a 1926 cabaret law to ban dancing in bars and clubs, imposing an excessive daily fee on street musicians, imposing varying city fees for newsstand owners based on the content they sold, a case against Time Warner Cable, and an incident in which Giuliani ordered an ad for New York magazine that featured his image taken down from city buses.[84][85] The ad featured a copy of the magazine with the caption, \"Possibly the only good thing Rudy hasn\'t taken credit for\".[86] The next year, the group awarded the Muzzle to Giuliani again for his actions against the Brooklyn Museum exhibit.[87]
Giuliani and his administration encountered accusations of blocking free speech arising from a lawsuit brought by Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church for removing the homeless from the church\'s steps against the church\'s will, and during his 1993 campaign, when he criticized incumbent Mayor Dinkins for allowing Louis Farrakhan to speak in the city. After being criticized for impinging on freedom of speech, he backed down from his criticism of Dinkins.[17]
In 2000, Mayor Giuliani received a \"Muzzle Award\" from the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Muzzles are \"awarded as a means to draw national attention to abridgments of free speech.\"[88] This was Giuliani\'s third such award, including an unprecedented first awarding of a \"Lifetime Muzzle Award,\" which noted he had \"stifled speech and press to so unprecedented a degree, and in so many and varied forms, that simply keeping up with the city\'s censorious activity has proved a challenge for defenders of free expression.\"[84]
More than 35 successful lawsuits were brought against Giuliani and his administration for blocking free speech. In his book Speaking Freely, First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams said Giuliani had an \"insistence on doing the one thing that the First Amendment most clearly forbids: using the power of government to restrict or punish speech critical of government itself.\"
