Permit Fees for Rallies Struck Down : Supreme Court: Justices rule, 5-4, that such levies for controversial groups who may stir hostile crowds violate free-speech protections.

WASHINGTON â€”  In a broad defense of the free-speech rights of protesters, the Supreme Court ruled Friday that cities and counties may not charge controversial groups a permit fee to hold a march or rally.

Even if the city needs to hire extra police to protect the marchers, officials may not force the protesters to pay this cost, the justices said on a 5-4 vote.

“Speech cannot be financially burdened, any more than it can be punished or banned, simply because it might offend a hostile mob,� wrote Justice Harry A. Blackmun for the court.

The decision will probably derail a movement among some localities to force marchers and demonstrators to pay some of the costs associated with their protests.

Significantly, three appointees of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush--Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy and David H. Souter--joined the more liberal Blackmun and John Paul Stevens in voting to strike down such laws.

The ruling invalidates an ordinance adopted in 1987 by rural Forsyth County, Ga., the scene of several violence-plagued marches by black civil rights advocates and white supremacist groups.

On Jan. 17, 1987, Hosea Williams, a black Atlanta city councilman, led a march of 90 civil rights demonstrators to Cumming, the seat of the nearly all-white county. But nearly 400 counter-demonstrators, members of the Ku Klux Klan and the Nationalist Movement, lined the parade route and threw rocks and bottles.

A week later, a second march drew 20,000 civil rights advocates and 1,000 counterdemonstrators. In addition, 3,000 police and National Guardsmen were there to prevent further violence. The extra protection for the marchers was said to cost the state and the county nearly $700,000.

In response, the county enacted a law that required future marchers to get a permit and pay up to $1,000 in fees. If a march or protest would prompt an increase in the “usual and normal cost of law enforcement,� the protest groups “should be held accountable and responsible� for these costs up to the $1,000 maximum, the ordinance said.

The Nationalist Group, a white supremacist organization, challenged the measure as a violation of the First Amendment. A federal judge in Atlanta initially upheld the law, but the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals struck it down as unconstitutional.

Agreeing with that judgment, the Supreme Court, in Forsythe County vs. Nationalist Movement, 91-538, stopped short of saying that all permit fees are always unconstitutional.

The Forsythe County law is flawed, Blackmun said, because it gives “uncontrolled discretion� to police officials to set the fee amount. But even reducing the fee to a “nominal amount� would not suffice, he added.

There is too much danger, he said, that such fees will be used to blunt “a controversial political message.�

In dissent, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, joined by Justices Byron R. White, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, said the ordinance should be upheld until actual evidence shows that the county was using high fees to stop marches and protests.