Location: New Jersey
I believe the mayor of my town is incompetent and corrupt. So I printed off some flyers detailing my issues with the mayor that had a QR code to find out more, and was handing them out at a local park during a holiday celebration. After about 30 minutes the cops came by and said they had a complaint about my flyer calling the mayor corrupt and that if I didn’t leave they would arrest me for disorderly conduct and cite me for littering because some people threw the flyer on the ground after taking it. Is this allowed? Were the police just bluffing and should I stand my ground next time?
Unless you were throwing your own flyers on the ground, the people who threw the flyers on the ground were littering, not you.
Sounds like it is time to print out flyers about how inept the city police are and hand them out.
Almost certainly bluffing, but police do things stupidly all the time. Arresting you (assuming the facts are true) would be a clear first amendment violation.
Id suggest reaching out to your local legal aid, FIRE or aclu chapter now bc it doesn’t hurt - you have a credible fear of arrest given the facts. In general you attack arrests after the fact, but when police use the law improperly to threaten legal conduct there are some limited instances to get relief before an arrest. Plus they’ll be able to screen for what facts you may be forgetting.
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Did you get a permit?
Do we need to a permit to exercise the 1st Amendment? What OP was doing it literally in the verbage.
No, but there are stipulations in NJ about when and where it can take place. Time, Place, and manner restrictions they are called. I would be pretty shocked to find out that doing this during a private/public holiday event wouldn't run cross of these restrictions. It also must be done in a non harassing manner.
Yes sure, like the having an assembly at the library or inside the lobby of city hall. Parks are open game as long as they are open.
This is just silly. One person is not an assembly.
Blanket permitting requirements to hand out leaflets in public fora are generally unconstitutional since Lovell (1930s). The edge cases are time/place/manner restrictions (eg, abortion clinics, nighttime restrictions, crowds, etc) or if a location is a public forum or not (the shopping malls cases in the 1980s, hari krishna cases in airports), and secondary behavior (“harassment” or littering, but many littering cases already have been litigated).
Time, Place, and manner restrictions apply in NJ. Doing this during a holiday celebration in the park almost certainly runs against those restrictions.
It is a public forum (a park) and speech was currently allowed, so disallowing other speech likely cannot meet time or place restrictions. Time/place/manner must be content neutral - and allowing some but not other speech in a location at a time when speech is otherwise allowed would likely not be content neutral.
Which leaves manner restrictions. But here we have the quintessential free speech — the humble leafleteer. This is Thomas Paine reincarnate! So, I doubt there is a valid manner restriction here.
But that is very different from your original point of needing a permit to hand out leaflets.
The harassing claim is context specific - is OP a crazy old man yelling into the wind? No reason to believe it from the post, and given the speech at issue and the relatively obviously bogus claim that OP would be arrested because other people littered? we can assume at this point its probably bogus. But, thats what I meant when I said a call to a real lawyer would sus out contrary facts that aren’t posted here.
Not sure what part of NJ law supersedes the US Constitution.