Legal Features

Opinion of the court in Karns v. Shanahan and Parker v. Shanahan

PHILADELPHIA, Pa. — The Rutherford Institute plans to request a rehearing before the entire Third Circuit Court of Appeals in a First Amendment case involving two street preachers who were charged with trespass and obstruction of justice and arrested for allegedly refusing police orders to cease proselytizing at a Princeton train station. In coming to the defense of evangelical preachers Don Karns and Robert Parker, Rutherford Institute attorneys challenged as discriminatory an alleged policy of the New Jersey Transit Corporation (NJTC), enforced by the NJTC police, requiring religious speakers to obtain a permit in order to engage in non-commercial speech at the station while waiving the requirement for political speakers.

In its ruling in Karns, et al. v. Shanahan, et al., a panel of U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that NJTC and the arresting officers were immune from Karns’ and Parker’s claims that their rights under the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments were violated. Institute attorneys will ask that the case be reheard by all the judges of the Third Circuit. Attorney John M. Bloor of Drinker, Biddle & Reath LLP of Philadelphia, Pa., is assisting The Rutherford Institute in its defense of Don Karns’ and Robert Parker’s First Amendment rights. The opinion of the court in Karns v. Shanahan and Parker v. Shanahan is available at www.rutherford.org.

“This case sheds light on a disconcerting bureaucratic mindset that wants us to believe that the government has the power to both bestow rights on the citizenry and withdraw those rights when it becomes necessary, whether it’s the right to proselytize on a train platform, the right to address one’s representatives at a city council meeting, or the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Yet those who founded this country believed that our rights are unalienable, meaning that no man or government can take them away from us. Thus, the problem in this case is not the absence of any specific law allowing free speech on the train platform. Rather, the problem is government officials who have forgotten that they work for us and their primary purpose is to safeguard our rights.”