statute did not permit ritual animal sacrifice. In September 1987, the city council unanimously passed three new ordinances that criminalized “sacrifices of animals for any type of ritual, regardless of whether or not the flesh or blood of the animal is to be consumed.” The city council exempted Kosher slaughterhouses, regular slaughterhouses, hunting, fishing, pest extermination, euthanasia of stray animals, and feeding live rabbits to greyhounds. The Church sued in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida. On June 10, 1988, U.S. District Judge Eugene P. Spellman granted absolute immunity to the individual city council members and the mayor. On October 5, 1989, after a nine-day bench trial, Judge Spellman granted summary judgment to the city. In 1991, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed in an unsigned one-paragraph per curiam decision, where it noted that Judge Spellman "employed an arguably stricter standard" than that applied in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), which had in the interim found Native Americans could be fired for their ritual use of peyote. In Smith, Justice Antonin Scalia had even cited Judge Spellman's opinion as authority, which the city highlighted in their appeals brief. The Court in Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) had explicitly provided Amish parents a religious exemption from mandatory school attendance under the Free Exercise Clause. However, in the years since, free-exercise claimants had lost every case before the Court, with the exception of a line of employment decisions cases terminated by Smith. The Church's petition for certiorari from the Supreme Court of the United States was granted, with Douglas Laycock appearing for the Church during oral arguments on November 4, 1992. Supreme Court Opinion of the Court On June 11, 1993, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the appeals court's decision. Justice Anthony Kennedy, in an Opinion of the Court joined in parts by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and Justices Byron White, John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, David Souter, and Clarence Thomas concluded that the city's ordinances violated the Free Exercise Clause of the United States Constitution. Kennedy read the Smith decision as requiring a compelling governmental interest if a law is not of neutral and general applicability. Kennedy went on, in a section Souter and White refused to join, to conclude that although the ordinances were facially neutral, they were religiously “gerrymandered with care” to only apply to religious killings. Kennedy, in a