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A federal appeals court in Denver has stayed an order demanding the Utah Highway Patrol Association remove crosses placed along the state's highways to commemorate troopers killed in the line of duty.
The 90-day stay, approved recently by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, means attorneys for the association and UHP can try to appeal their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which they hope may reverse lower court decisions that the crosses are unconstitutional.
The Utah Attorney General's Office requested the stay. UHP and its association plans to appeal its case to the Supreme Court, said Byron Babione, an Arizona-based attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund, which is representing Utah troopers' case.
But getting the nation's high court to take the case could be a long shot the Supreme Court only hears roughly 50 cases each year out of the 10,000 that apply, said Brian Barnard, a Utah civil rights attorney for Texas-based American Atheists Inc., which filed the suit against UHP and its association in 2005.
The case began when American Atheists Inc. and three of its Utah members sued the state for allowing the association to incorporate the UHP logo on the 12-foot-high crosses and place some of them on public property.
Fourteen crosses sit alongside state highways or on the lawn outside a UHP office to memorialize troopers who died in the line of duty.
The trooper's name, rank and badge number are printed on a 6-foot crossbar, and a large depiction of the UHP's beehive symbol hangs below the spot where the two bars meet. The first cross was erected in 1998 on private property and 13 others were added later, most of them on public property. The memorials are privately funded and owned by the Utah Highway Patrol Association (UHPA), while the state owns the public land on which some of them sit.
Barnard said his clients' position hasn't changed as the UHPA continues to fight a legal battle to keep the crosses.
"My clients believe that the Highway Patrol troopers should be honored for their sacrifice. They can be and should be honored with memorials that do not emphasize religion and do not emphasize one religion to the exclusion of all others," Barnard said.
The federal appeals court decision to allow the stay follows a December decision by the same court to deny a request to hear the case from the UHPA.
In a 5-4 ruling in December, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals denied the appeal to hear the case. The Utah Highway Patrol Association had wanted the court to reverse an earlier ruling that the crosses are unconstitutional.
Dissenting judges argued that not hearing the case may send a message that federal courts are "increasingly hostile to religious symbols in the public sphere."
The dissenting judges wrote that the court erred in presuming religious symbols on public property are unconstitutional. They also said the court did not acknowledge the crosses' physical appearance or consider their context, which led to the assumption that "UHP is a sort of 'Christian police' that favors Christians over non-Christians a conclusion that has no support in facts," the judges wrote.
Dissenting judges also disagreed with the court's earlier decision that crosses endorse a certain religion.
"Contrary to the court's decision, the defendants did not bear the impossible burden of proving that Latin crosses are secular symbols. Rather, they needed to show only that the memorial crosses at issue conveyed a message of memorialization, not endorsement," the judges wrote.
Judges who denied the request to rehear the case said the court made the right decision in ruling the crosses unconstitutional.