Christians Arrested for Street Preaching at NJ Train Station

Two New Jersey men were minding their own business and peacefully proselytizing on behalf of their faith to interested passerby at a train station when they were approached by police officers who ordered them to cease their preaching. As the men pointed out, there were no signs indicating they weren’t allowed to preach and said the station was a public space, prompting the officers to arrest them and sparking a potentially significant case for First Amendment rights:

“Attorney John M. Bloor of Drinker, Biddle & Reath, LLP, is assisting The Rutherford Institute in its defense of Karns’ and Parker’s First and Fourth Amendment rights.

“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.”

Source: The Rutherford Institute