A Kansas woman who says her First Amendment rights were violated when police officers stopped her from praying in her home will get another chance in court, the Supreme Court said Thursday.
In an unsigned opinion, the court reversed a ruling from the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which granted qualified immunity to the officers involved in a 2013 incident involving Mary Anne Sause and dismissed the case. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower court for further proceedings.
Sause’s case stems from an encounter she had with police who visited her apartment in response to a noise complaint. After Sause initially refused to open the door, the officers told her she would be going to jail and made comments mocking the Constitution, according to court documents.
After hearing the officers’ comments, Sause asked one if she could pray and received permission to do so, court filings say. She then knelt on a prayer rug and began to silently pray. But the second officer involved ordered her to stop. She was cited for disorderly conduct and interfering with law enforcement.
Sause then filed a lawsuit against the two officers, saying her First Amendment rights had been violated.
At the district court level, the officers moved to dismiss Sause’s complaint, saying they were entitled to qualified immunity, which shields law enforcement from lawsuits challenging conduct that occurred while they were on duty. The motion was granted.
The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the decision from the lower court, but acknowledged the officers’ conduct was wrong.
In its unsigned opinion, the Supreme Court said there “can be no doubt that the First Amendment protects the right to pray.” But the court said that when a police officer’s “order to stop praying is alleged to have occurred during the course of investigative conduct that implicates Fourth Amendment rights, the First and Fourth Amendment issues may be inextricable.
“That is the situation here,” the court said.
The high court noted in its unsigned opinion that a number of questions surrounding the encounter between Sause and the officers remain unanswered, including whether the officers were in Sause’s apartment with her consent and whether the officers had “some other ground consistent with the Fourth Amendment for entering and remaining there.”
“Without knowing the answers to these questions, it is impossible to analyze petitioners’ free exercise claim,” the court said.
First Liberty, which is representing Sause in the case, praised the Supreme Court’s action.
“The Supreme Court’s decision today is a just outcome for Ms. Sause and a victory for religious liberty,” Kelly Shackelford, president of First Liberty, said in a statement. “No American citizen should ever be subjected to such outrageous, blatantly unconstitutional behavior by government officials.”
