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Court Weighs Local Ordinance in Free Speech Case
Jehovah's Witnesses' Rights at Issue in Door-to-Door Appeals

By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 26, 2002; 2:12 PM

U.S. Supreme Court justices rained skepticism on an Ohio village's effort to regulate door-to-door proselytizing by the Jehovah's Witnesses, suggesting through their questions during oral arguments today that the local ordinance violates the religious group's rights to free speech.

The Village of Stratton, a collection of some 300 largely elderly people living on the banks of the Ohio River, says its ordinance requiring a permit to go door-to-door is necessary to protect the safety and privacy of its residents, and applies equally to everyone.

The Jehovah's Witnesses, who have a long history of fighting and winning free-speech cases at the Supreme Court, sued Stratton, claiming that the ordinance violates the First Amendment, but both a federal trial judge in Ohio and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit sided with the village.

At the Supreme Court today, however, most of the pressure seemed to be on Abraham Cantor, the attorney for Stratton.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor asked whether the ordinance might also mean that trick-or-treaters should have to get a permit. Cantor said it would not.

"We can all stipulate that the safest societies in the world are totalitarian societies," Justice Antonin Scalia remarked to Cantor, adding that accepting "some risk" of crime might be necessary to achieve liberty.

Only Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist evinced a measure of sympathy for the village's approach, noting that two teenagers recently arrested for a brutal double murder in rural New Hampshire allegedly posed as poll-takers to gain access to homes in the area.

The case is Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York v. Village of Stratton, No. 00-1737. A decision is expected by July.

Mentally retarded individuals are vulnerable to exploitation, susceptible to suggestion and more likely to confess falsely than other suspects, medical and legal experts say. But police and prosecutors in Cook County [Chicago] have repeatedly assumed the risk of building cases on little more than a confession from such defendants.

At least two dozen of the 247 defendants in the cases examined by the Tribune were mentally retarded, or had significant learning disabilities.

Eight years ago, as it threw out a mentally retarded teenager's confession in a Downstate case, the Illinois Appellate Court wrote that "society is not being served by the police obtaining a false confession from a subnormally intelligent suspect, while the real criminal remains free."