By Ben Joravsky
The ticket in question was issued on September 28, 1997, when Pincham was attending a service at the Trinity United Church of Christ, at 94th and Eggleston. The church, one of the south side’s most popular, draws as many as 12,000 people to its three Sunday services. As a result, there’s usually a great demand for parking on Eggleston.
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Indeed, Pincham made his objections known to the cop who ticketed his car. “I verbally questioned him about the ticket,” says Pincham. “I told him that you could be more profitably utilizing your time that taxpayers are paying for by policing the streets against burglaries, robberies, drug peddling, murders, and what have you. I asked him if he really believed that it was in the best interests of the community to utilize his time as a law-enforcement officer by writing parking tickets on the cars of people who are in church. I told him that I’d been all over the country and I’ve never seen people ticketed for parking in order to worship their god. He said it was the law. And I told him that the law expects you to use good judgment in its enforcement and good judgment is not to harass people on Sunday.”
For the last year Pincham and city lawyers have exchanged briefs, claims, and counterclaims–the court file’s over one foot thick–on the pros and cons of the matter. Pincham says he’s spent several hundred dollars on court costs and copying fees. City officials say they don’t know how much they have spent on the case. Neither side shows any sign of backing down.
On May 13 Pincham finally got his day in court, appearing before circuit judge Albert Green. “I told the judge that there is no debate that the City Council has the authority to pass laws regulating traffic and parking,” says Pincham. “But this particular [ban on Eggleston] does neither. Instead, it confers a special privilege to a special group. What’s next? Are we going to pass an ordinance that says people driving white cars can park but people driving black cars cannot? Yes, the city has the right, indeed the responsibility, to enforce parking laws. But they must be wise and judicious in their enforcement, otherwise they’re being arbitrary and absurd.”
Coincidentally, the case on which the city bases its argument ended in a state supreme court ruling that overturned a decision Pincham wrote in 1988. In that case, two mobile vending companies challenged a city ban against food vendors in the near-west-side medical district. Pincham ruled in favor of the vendors, writing that the city’s power “to regulate and prohibit the use of its streets for private gain is unquestioned [but] the evidence presented [proved] that the ordinance constitutes arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable municipal action [and] there is no permissible interpretation which justifies its adoption.” Overruling Pincham, the supreme court wrote that “the fit between the means and the end to be achieved need not be perfect.”
