The evangelist is Gabriel Olivier.
He's being represented by attorneys at First Liberty Institute. A ruling will most likely occur next year.
Nate Kellum of First Liberty Institute told AFN earlier this year that the constitutional concern here is multi-layered.
"He was stopped by a city ordinance, Brandon's ordinance, that essentially separates him and others, speakers, from being able to communicate with their audience, to be able to share the gospel with people, to be able to evangelize," said Kellum.
The law is designed to place Christians too far away to be impactful.
The dispute centers on the experiences of Gabriel Olivier, a pastor from Bolton, Mississippi, who described himself as a “public evangelist” in an interview with SCOTUSblog. He feels called to share his Christian faith with others, and for much of the past decade he’s done so by going to places where “there’s going to be a lot of people,” such as concert venues, to “preach the gospel,” hand out religious literature, and hold up signs with scripture verses on them.
This mission brought Olivier and others to an amphitheater in Brandon, Mississippi, several times in 2018 and 2019. In late 2019, however, after city leaders determined that demonstrations outside the venue were creating “hardships” for law enforcement officers, Brandon enacted an ordinance that requires protesters and other demonstrators to stand within a designated protest area.
In 2021, when Olivier resumed his protest outside the designated area, he was arrested.
"What the ordinance does is it pushes him and others 300 feet away from the folks with whom they'd like to share, and that's a real concern because they're not able to talk with people, they're not able to hand out literature to people, they're so far away people can't see any signs, nor can they hear them by use of amplification, so, it completely eliminates his ability to be able to share the gospel which is the very reason why he wants to go to that public park in Brandon."
Meanwhile, Kellum said Olivier has no ability to challenge this "blatantly unconstitutional law" in court.
"The reason is because an officer unjustly arrested him, he just paid a fine, and because of that, the federal district court where he filed his claim decided he could not pursue his claim, that the state criminal court had already dealt with it and, due to a really unusual approach to a U.S. Supreme Court decision, decided that he was precluded from even challenging that ordinance," said Kellum.
How it got here
The district court dismissed Olivier’s claim citing a 1994 Supreme Court decision that bars convicted criminals from challenging the law under which they were convicted when a favorable judgment would imply the invalidity of their conviction.
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower-court ruling.
The key argument from Olivier’s legal team is that the 5th Circuit is applying the Heck decision too broadly. In Heck the court was hoping to prevent a “flood” of Section 1983 lawsuits from prisoners who were frustrated with how their cases had played out, and so the court made it clear that habeas corpus is the “appropriate forum” for them to challenge their convictions. It wasn’t looking to limit the options of someone concerned about future prosecution, especially not someone who is not in custody and cannot make a habeas claim, Kellum told SCOTUSblog.
