“Neither the fact that the prayer may be denominationally neutral nor the fact that its observance on the part of the students is voluntary can serve to free it from the limitations of the Establishment Clause.... When the power, prestige and financial support of government is placed behind a particular religious belief, the indirect coercive pressure upon religious minorities to conform to the prevailing officially approved religion is plain.”
“The right to demonstrate is a significant strand of the cluster of First Amendment rights. The vindication of these rights warrants more than token acknowledgement.... Compensatory damages embrace more than recompense for monetary injury ... as is evident from amounts for pain, suffering, and humilation.... It is in the public interest that there be a reasonably spacious approach to a fair compensatory award for denial or curtailment of the right to demonstrate. The district court's limited approach cannot stand.”
“no less administrable than damage awards for other intangible interests protected by the Constitution or at common law. The interest in freedom from apprehension of immediate invasion of one's person, protected for hundreds of years by the law of assault, is only one example of a non-quantifiable interest whose recompense in money damages is routinely left to a jury under proper instructions. The interest protected by the First Amendment in the context of this case is no less certain of quantification or conceptualization.”
In any event, plaintiff produced sufficient evidence of actual damages in this case to justify a substantial compensatory award under Count One. Plaintiff proved his medical expenses and loss of earnings. He testified that he was afraid that he might go to prison during the period that the false charges *1416 were pending; he lost interest in recreational activities; he can only do light work; he has suffered personality changes and has lost confidence in himself; he has begun to drink heavily; he has a constant irrational fear of police officers; he has trouble sleeping and he has a recurring nightmare in which the police shoot at him and his brother and kill his brother. A psychiatrist testified that plaintiff suffers from traumatic neuroses from which he may never recover and recommended a year of therapy. Defendants called no witnesses to rebut the evidence of psychological injury. Although some of these damages are not quantifiable with precision, they are nevertheless actual damages which could support the compensatory award in this case.
Irma Torrez seeks $10,000 damages for violation of her association rights. The district court found, however, that Torrez failed to prove any actual, compensable injury stemming from the receipt of the section 4.28 demand for disclosure. After a thorough review of the record, we cannot conclude that this finding was clearly erroneous.
“involve some confrontation with the plaintiff in person or some indirect affront to his personality—assault, battery, false imprisonment, malicious prosecution, intentional infliction of mental anguish, libel and slander, invasion of privacy, alienation of affections are all in this category. These torts have their statutory and constitutional analogues, so that essentially the same sort of interests may be protected under federal or state civil rights statutes or under the federal Constitution.”
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