Retired Police Officer Arrested
for Sharing Gospel in New Jersey Mall
David Wells is a former corporal with the Long Branch Police Department, and over the past year, he has spent time sharing his faith at the Monmouth Mall in Eatontown. Wells says that he likes to distribute materials from Ray Comfort’s Living Waters Publications to shoppers in hopes that it will cause them to ponder matters of eternity. This past week, he handed out Comfort’s trillion dollar bill tract while asking a “trillion dollar” question.
EXCERPTS:
The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in 1994 in the case of New Jersey Coalition Against War in the Middle East v. J.M.B. Realty Corporation that malls followed the “historical path of free speech,” in the vein of parks, squares and downtown business districts. It allowed citizens to leaflet both inside and outside malls, but did not endorse other forms of expression such as public speeches.
“We believe that this constitutional free speech right, thus limited, will perform the intended role of assuring that the free speech of New Jersey’s citizens can be heard, can be effective, and can reach at least as many people as it used to before the downtown business districts were transported to the malls,” the court wrote.
“[S]ome people will not like it, any more perhaps than they liked free speech at the downtown business districts. Dislike for free speech, however, has never been the determinant of its protection or its benefit. We live with it, we permit it, as we have for more than two hundred years,” the court stated. “It is free speech, it is constitutionally protected; it is part of this State, and so are these centers.”
PETITION AT THIS WEBSITE:
