It wasn’t in the cards.
A fortune-teller who sued Montgomery County hoping to overturn a law that bans the business of forecasting the future has lost his case, attorneys for both sides told The Examiner.
Nick Nefedro, previously of Key West, Fla., said county officials violated his First Amendment rights to free speech and discriminated against his Roma, or Gypsy, culture when they refused to give him a business license to open a foretune-telling shop in Bethesda. Montgomery code dating back to the early 1950s prohibits collecting cash for predicting the future.
Both sides filed for summary judgment, asking a circuit court judge to rule in favor of one party without going to trial.
Clifford Royalty, an attorney for Montgomery County, told The Examiner the court upheld the law and he expected a judge to return a signed copy of his written order this week.
“Insofar as the county law does regulate speech, it is narrowly drawn to serve the county’s compelling government interest in protecting its citizenry from fraud,” Royalty’s order said.
“The judge said he agreed with my argument, that this was a proper exercise of police power and would survive scrutiny under the First Amendment,” Royalty told The Examiner. “The judge also asked counsel for Mr. Nefedro if he’d predicted that outcome.”
Nefedro’s attorney, Ed Amourgis, said he was surprised by the decision.
“I suppose with this ruling, people in Montgomery County are not going to be able to sit down at the breakfast table anymore and read their horoscope with the paper, because they paid for that paper so it would violate the ban, right?” Amourgis said.
In the Washington suburbs, Montgomery County is alone in banning fortune-telling — all other counties contacted by The Examiner allow fortune-tellers to operate. The District does not even require a business license, but most counties in the region ask fortune-tellers to follow the same regulatory practices as other service providers.
A federal judge upheld a similar ban in Harford County in 2002, deferring to the county’s assessment of fortune-telling as “inherently deceptive.”
The penalty for violating Montgomery County’s ban is a $250 fine.
“Mr. Nefedro wonders why the little guy has to fight for the simplest of constitutional freedoms,” Amourgis said, adding there were no firm plans to appeal but they were “looking for other avenues to pursue it.”
