Coming to a neighborhood near you. Police Threaten Arrest for Distributing Christian Leaflets on Public Property. A senior citizen from Louisiana is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether law enforcement officers can threaten arrest for handing out religious literature on a public sidewalk while allowing commercial leafleting to continue undisturbed.
Richard Hershey was peacefully distributing free pamphlets from the Christian Vegetarian Association outside the Brookshire Grocery Arena in Bossier City on February 28, 2020. The arena sits inside a public park. Officers approached him while brandishing handcuffs and ordered him to stop or face arrest.
They told him the area was private property and that he needed prior permission to share religious materials. At the same time, another individual was distributing commercial advertisements for a local radio station in the same vicinity. That person faced no interference.
Hershey left the area to avoid being taken into custody. He later filed a federal lawsuit against the city, two police officers, and three private security guards. He alleged that the officers engaged in viewpoint discrimination by targeting his religious speech while leaving commercial speech untouched, violating his rights under the First Amendment’s Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses.
Read this: One man was threatened with arrest for sharing his faith on a public sidewalk, while another person distributing commercial material nearby was left alone.
A federal district judge dismissed the case. In October 2025, a divided panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals partially reversed that decision, allowing some claims to proceed against the city but upholding qualified immunity for the individual officers and dismissing claims against the private security personnel.
Hershey, represented with assistance from the First Liberty Institute and former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, has now petitioned the Supreme Court to review the qualified immunity ruling. His petition argues that the officers committed an obvious constitutional violation by threatening arrest and banishing him from a public park over religious leafleting while ignoring a nearby commercial distributor.
The filing states that the right to evangelize publicly without viewpoint-based government suppression is clearly established under both the Free Speech and Free Exercise protections. It describes discrimination against religious speech as “viewpoint discrimination (im)pure and simple” and contends that no government official should require a specific circuit precedent to understand that the Constitution forbids such selective enforcement.
Hiram Sasser, executive general counsel for the First Liberty Institute, emphasized the broader stakes: if citizens cannot realistically sue when their First Amendment rights are clearly violated, those rights lose practical meaning. Supporters of the petition argue that the Fifth Circuit’s approach creates a troubling double standard, making it harder to hold officials accountable even when they appear to single out religious expression.
The case raises important questions about the scope of qualified immunity and the treatment of religious speech in traditional public forums such as sidewalks and parks. Public spaces have long been recognized as places where citizens may share ideas, including religious ones, and are protected by strong constitutional safeguards against content-based restrictions.
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