Police Tell Woman She Can't Pray Inside Home, Constitution Is 'Just a Piece of Paper'
Mary Anne Sause, a Louisburg, Kansas, woman who says she was ordered by local police to stop praying in her home and told that a copy of the Constitution she showed them was "just a piece of paper," has appealed a district court's ruling that officers did not violate her First Amendment.
First Liberty Institute appealed the district court's ruling to the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit last Wednesday, arguing that the officers' conduct violated Sause's First Amendment right to pray in her own home and to be free from retaliation for exercising that right, according to information provided by the First Liberty Institute.
Sause, a retired Catholic nurse on disability and rape survivor, was at home on the night of Nov. 22, 2013, when two police officers approached her door and demanded to be allowed in. Sause said the officers did not identify themselves, and she could not see them through...