OGDEN -- The Utah chapter of the ACLU will air its concerns about Ogden's fledgling street gang injunction during a Weber State University convocation lecture Wednesday on campus.
The injunction, ordered into law Sept. 27 by a 2nd District Court judge, bans Trece street gang members from associating with each other in public, being in the vicinity of guns, drugs or alcohol, and staying out past an 11 p.m. curfew.
Common in California and used in a few other states, the injunction is a first in Utah. The 331-page injunction was a year in the making by the Weber County Attorney's Office and the Ogden-Metro Gang Task Force.
Roughly half of the Trece membership of 300-plus has been served with the injunction, police have said. Several dozen Treces have been arrested for violations of the association and curfew bans of the injunction.
The gang is Ogden's oldest, dating back to the early 1970s.
Violating the injunction is only a class B misdemeanor, prosecuted in the Ogden Justice Court. But several arrests incident to the injunction have resulted in more serious charges filed in the district court when guns and drugs were found on the arrested Treces.
The ACLU of Utah and several local defense attorneys have already taken the injunction all the way to the Utah Supreme Court where, in October, it withstood a challenge.
Attorneys on both sides expect it to end up before that court again.
"Yes, we all think it's going to get there eventually," said Darcy Goddard, legal director of the Utah ACLU, a former assistant New York attorney general.
She and David Reymann, an associate attorney for the ACLU who argued the case before the state supreme court last fall, will present the forum from 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Wednesday in Ballroom A of the Shepherd Student Union Building on campus.
Only the ACLU was invited to the convocation billed as "Constitutional Rights in the Balance: Challenging Ogden's Gang Injunction," said Goddard.
The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session and is sponsored by WSU Convocations and the American Democracy Project.
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