EP 613- Fighting for Constitutional Rights Part 3

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to The Jury is Out a podcast for trial attorneys who want to sharpen their skills and better serve their clients. Your co-hosts are John Simon, founder of the Simon Law Firm, Tim Cronin, personal injury trial attorney at the Simon Law Firm and St. Louis attorney Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth:

Welcome to another episode of The Jury is Out. I’m Erich Vieth and I’m here again with Dave Roland. Welcome back Dave.

Dave Roland:

Thanks so much.

Erich Vieth:

We’ve covered a lot of territory already, but the Freedom Center of Missouri does a lot of things. Let’s hear about your work.

Dave Roland:

One of the cases that listeners might have heard about, but maybe not, we took on a property rights case in St. Louis County where the community St. Peter’s has an ordinance that requires homeowners to devote at least half of their lawn space to growing turf grass. So we got a call from this prospective client. She was in her early seventies, a two time cancer survivor who is horribly allergic to grass, and so she and her husband had torn out all of the grass on her property and replaced it with a beautiful, well-maintained flower garden. And as part of this garden, they actually included some ground cover plants that kind of give the appearance of grass, but they’re not grass, so they’re kind of low to the ground and they’re green and lush, but it’s not turf grass. One of her neighbors complained about their flower garden, and so the city came after her. Now, I want you to understand the penalties involved were up to $250 per day that you were out of compliance and the potential for 10 days in prison per day that you were out of compliance with the turfgrass mandate.

Erich Vieth:

I want to make sure I understand. This is a city ordinance.

Dave Roland:

This was a city ordinance,

Erich Vieth:

And so if you plant a plant that looks like grass, that’s not grass. Those are the penalties.

Dave Roland:

Those are the penalties, yeah, and it’s got to cover at least half of your yard. Now again, this is a plant that made my client very sick, and so the government was basically threatening her with these penalties unless she voluntarily exposed herself to this plant. And again, it’s also, it’s not just planting it. You also have to maintain it because as we know, cities require you to keep grass below a certain height, so they had to cultivate this plant that made her sick. We thought this violated her right to use a property in peaceful ways of her own choosing, and we fought that case all the way up to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals and the eighth circuit ended up kicking us out on a technicality. We fought that case for five years, and ultimately we initially filed in state court and we lost in the first round.

We got dismissed on the first round, went to the State Court of Appeals, won a reversal, and the State Court of appeals got sent back down to the trial court where we filed a voluntary dismissal and refiled in federal court. And because of the way that we did that, the eighth circuit said that one of the issues that we wanted to pursue was race judicata and therefore they would not decide it. Now, Eric, far be it from me to question the wisdom of federal judges, but I firmly believe we did exactly what Missouri law required to preserve that issue. But if the Eighth Circuit says you didn’t preserve an issue, you didn’t preserve an issue. The gratification I have about the way that that case came out is Jan Duffner lived the rest of her life in that house with her flowers and the city never bothered her again, even though we ultimately did not prevail in the case, the city was aware that if they tried to actually punish her, that we were going to fight it from a defensive standpoint and we’d be able to raise all of those issues that the eighth Circuit said had been waived.

And so the city left her alone for the rest of her life and she was able to die in that house with her flower garden. So in a sense, it was a successful outcome even if it wasn’t the one that we wanted. We also took on an issue that people may remember. A couple of Girl Scouts in the city of Hazelwood had for years sold cookies out of their driveway. Girl Scout cookies are a big deal every year. Lots of people look forward to it every year, and so these girl Scouts for several years had set up a little cookie booth out in their driveway and people could stop by and buy their cookies. One year, one neighbor complained and the complaint that the neighbor

Erich Vieth:

Made neighbors, these neighbors

Dave Roland:

Neighbors noisy neighbors, the complaint the neighbor made was that the cars that were stopping to buy cookies were making her dogs bark. That was the complaint. And the city says, oh, well, the girls don’t have a permit for this cookie stand, so we’re going to shut ’em down.

Erich Vieth:

You mean a business license, that kind of thing?

Dave Roland:

Well, yes, yes, exactly. Now, when I first heard about this, I thought it sounded crazy, and then I did research and I found out that all over the country there had been local governments that were telling kids that they had to shut down lemonade stands and cookie stands and things like that. And so we started the Lemonade Freedom Initiative. We filed this lawsuit on behalf of the Girl Scouts in Hazelwood, and then the idea started getting picked up in state legislatures across the country. It started in Utah. Utah passed a state law that said that local governments could no longer go after these kids who had their little lemonade stands and cookie stands, and since then, I believe another half dozen states have adopted laws protecting childhood entrepreneurship, not Missouri yet. Missouri has not yet done this, but we are always very excited to see the scope of the Lemonade Freedom Movement.

Also, a couple of years after we filed that lawsuit, country Time Lemonade made a commercial that basically played on the idea of saying that they would come to the defense of any kids that had used country time lemonade to set up a lemonade stand if their city tried to shut ’em down. We didn’t get any credit for that, but I kind of think that the idea came from our lawsuit because as far as I know, we were the only ones who ever filed a lawsuit over the issue. But again, what it really boiled down to is the idea is they weren’t hurting anybody by setting up and selling cookies out of their driveway. Why in the world should the city be able to come and punish somebody who’s using their property in a perfectly harmless way? Similar issue. A guy in another nearby community during the economic downturn back around 2008, lost his job and couldn’t provide for his family in any other way, but what he could do is he could grow a garden to provide them with healthy organic produce.

And so his backyard was blocked by shade trees, and so he planted his garden in his front yard. One of his neighbors complained, and so even though the city did not have any laws on its books that prohibited this, they tried to tell him he had to uproot his vegetable garden. And so we got involved and we went to the mattresses for him and got the city to back off, and so he continued to grow. That garden for several years popped up again in a case a couple of years ago where a guy wanted to grow sunflowers in his front yard, no law against the flowers. The flowers themselves were perfectly fine, but the city decided they didn’t want those flowers there, and so they were going to come after him. When we entered our appearance in that case, the city eventually backed off and they decided not to pursue the charges against him. But those are some of the cases that we’ve taken on just to try and highlight the simple principle of people being able to use their property in harmless ways. Why should it be that someone’s neighbors gets to dictate whether or not someone can do something as simple as growing food or growing flowers in their own yard?

Erich Vieth:

I went to your website and under the property rights section I saw, to my surprise, there’s quite a few sections under the Missouri Constitution provide. Could you mention a few of those? Absolutely. I didn’t know

Dave Roland:

This. Yeah, so again, on paper, the Missouri Constitution provides some exceptional protections for property. So for example, in addition to the natural right to life, liberty property, the pursuit of happiness and the right to enjoy the gains of your own industry, Missouri has a parallel provision to the due process clause that says that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. That’s Article one, section 10 of the Missouri Constitution. Article one, section 26 says that private property shall not be taken or damaged for public use without just compensation. That’s an echo of the fifth and 14th amendments, which say that property shall not be taken for public use. But Missouri’s constitution, once again goes farther. It says it shall not be taken or damaged. The idea originally being that it would be a damage to one’s property to encumber it in such a way that it reduces its value.

So especially back in the early 20th century when zoning was first kind of coming into vogue, cities would say, all right, you’re no longer allowed to use your property in X, y, or Z ways, and the citizens would sue and they would win in Missouri State Court based on this constitutional provision, the court said, okay, if you’re going to damage the person’s property by saying you are no longer allowed to use it in this way, you have to at a bare minimum compensate them for the loss. You have to compensate them for the damage. Done. After the Missouri Supreme Court decided a couple of cases in that direction, they then abruptly reversed course it was in, I believe it was a Kansas City case where they said, yeah, you know what we said about how cities have to pay if they damage someone’s property value by restricting the use of the property that no longer applies.

That was right about the same time that the US Supreme Court decided a case that said that the US Constitution did not impose restrictions on zoning laws. And of course, it was those zoning laws that ultimately resulted in the turfgrass mandate in St. Peter’s that resulted in cities saying, you can’t grow flowers in your yard or you can’t sell Girl Scout cookies out of your own driveway. The proliferation in the expansion of the principle of zoning has allowed for the really, I think, unconscionable restrictions of property rights that you see. In addition to Article one Section 26, there’s also a provision of the Missouri Constitution Article one section 28 that goes pretty far. It says Private property shall not be taken for private use with or without compensation. And when an attempt is made to take private property for a use alleged to be public, the question whether the contemplated use be public shall be judicially determined without regard to any legislation legislative declaration that the use is public.

Now, you may remember we talked previously about Kilo versus New London, which involved a taking of private property for private use under Article one, section 28 of the Missouri Constitution that should not be permissible under Missouri law. The problem is under Missouri law, they have found loopholes. So we talked about how in New London, none of the properties there were blighted. They were all perfectly fine in terms of structure and usage, but the city thought, well, we might make more tax revenue. That’s not a legitimate justification under Missouri law. But what Missouri has done is they have passed laws that allow for incredibly expansive declarations of blight. In other words, blight can mean essentially whatever a local government wants it to mean. I did a presentation on this at one point called Defining Away Property Rights that talked about ways that local governments have defined blight in such a way that almost any property in their community could be considered blighted, and where a blight designation has been put in place, Missouri courts have said it’s not taking a private property for private use, it’s taking for a public use. And so they have chosen not to apply Article one, section 28 where that particular in run is being employed.

Erich Vieth:

Okay, so I’m one of these people who does not have a good idea of what blight means. I hear people saying it all the time, oh, that’s a blighted neighborhood. What does it mean as best you can discern from the courts or the appellate courts?

Dave Roland:

This is a fantastic question and one that has a great historical answer. So historically, the idea of blight involved properties that posed some sort of threat to the health or safety or welfare of the community. You might have a structure that was unsound where there was a risk that it might collapse and harm somebody in some way. You might have a structure that was harboring unhealthy conditions so that disease might be a concern or vermin might be a concern. And so where you had a demonstration evidence that the structure itself was harboring a threat to the health or safety of the community, that’s what blight was. Over the years, however, the definition of blight got to be a lot more flexible, and it became less about addressing actual threats to the health or safety of the community and more about alleged economic concerns. So in other words, a claim that, well, this neighborhood is not developing as quickly as the neighborhoods around it or we’re concerned that the businesses in this neighborhood keep closing.

That came to be deemed a measure of blight even though it had nothing to do with the health or safety of the community. And it’s that kind of flexibility in the definition of blight that allowed the city of Clayton to try and take an office building that was only about 30 years old and was fully occupied and handed over to Centene who said they were going to build a new world headquarters there. And so the city of Clayton declares blighted a perfectly sound structure where there was no possible threat to the public health or safety. And on top of that existed in one of the wealthiest zip codes in the state, and it took the Missouri Supreme Court saying, well, city of Clayton, you didn’t check all the boxes you were required to check to make this a valid blight declaration. The Supreme Court did not challenge the concept of applying blight to this property. They told Clayton that they had not checked the appropriate boxes.

Erich Vieth:

Who decides in a trial, the jury or the judge?

Dave Roland:

The courts ultimately decide whether a blight designation is adequate.

Erich Vieth:

The courts do,

Dave Roland:

Yes, and yet they don’t. Or rather, the courts tend to defer to decisions by the legislature and declarations by the legislature, which again is part of the reason that we have the language that we have in Article one section 28. So I’ve mentioned previously that the people who drafted the Missouri Constitution were building from a wealth of experience with ways that constitutional rights had been abused previously. And one of the things they had seen is that they knew that an in run around the idea of a private property being taken for private use is that the government can just say, oh, well no, this is a public use and courts like to defer to those kinds of declarations. And so the people of Missouri ratified this provision that says, courts have got to make this judgment without any deference to a legislative declaration that this is for a public purpose or a public use. And yet it is very difficult to get courts to actually apply that particular protection, which again is part of the reason why the Freedom Center has made this an issue. Our goal is to raise these issues frequently enough and in such a way that it forces the courts to really confront the historical reasons for these constitutional protections and hopefully to acknowledge that we are not protecting those liberties the way that they should be protected and we need to adjust our approach. That’s the whole goal of public interest litigation.

Erich Vieth:

Could you tell us about your work in the area of religious liberty?

Dave Roland:

One of my favorite cases that the Freedom Center has ever taken dealt with a good Samaritan over in St. Louis City who had made it his ministry for 40 years to seek out people who were hungry and to provide food. Even people who are not Christian May be aware that one of the things that the Bible says Jesus placed great importance on was giving food to the hungry, giving something to drink to those who are thirsty. And in the gospels, Jesus said, when you do this for even the least of these, you do this for me. And so Pastor Ray took very seriously this admonition in the gospels that by giving food to people who are hungry, he was serving Jesus himself. And yet on Halloween a few years ago, people called to complain that he was providing sandwiches to homeless people,

Erich Vieth:

Neighbors,

Dave Roland:

I don’t know who filed

Erich Vieth:

The complaint. Oh, I’m sorry. You turned me against neighbors.

Dave Roland:

I don’t know who submitted the complaint, but the police came and in fact, they said, you are violating our city ordinances. In order to share food with people, you have to have permission from the city, and that permission comes at a cost. You had to apply for and pay for certain permits. You had to comply with regulations like you had to have a sink and separate tubs of hot and cold water and sanitation facilities and all stuff like that. None of which you can do if you are going from block to block looking for hungry people to feed. We filed a lawsuit against the city of St. Louis, and we fought that case for about four, four and a half years until ultimately we lost in the eighth circuit. The interesting thing that came about in that case is that the city’s ordinance was pretty explicit.

Even if you were providing food that was not prone to spoilage or food poisoning, you still had to check all of these boxes that the city had put out there. In response to that, the city said, yes, but we don’t enforce this ordinance in this way. Yes, this is what’s on the books, but we don’t enforce it that way, so you can’t hold that. We violated the Pastor Ray’s constitutional rights by requiring him to do this effectively. The city said, tell you what, we will allow him to share certain types of food as long as he doesn’t share, say, baloney sandwiches or things like that. So he could share peanut butter sandwiches or he could share prepackaged food, but he could not share bologna sandwiches even if they had been properly refrigerated or anything like that. By the way, all of the food that Pastor Ray was sharing was prepared at certified facilities.

A lot of churches have gone ahead and gotten their kitchens at their churches certified for food preparation. And so these churches that had certified food preparation facilities would prepare the sandwiches, provide them to Pastor Ray who would keep them cold at the temperatures you were supposed to keep them at before distributing them. So really there should have been no question about the quality of the food being provided, but because the city said, we don’t apply our law the way that they’re saying, the eighth Circuit said, well, we’re not going to strike down the way that their ordinances are

Erich Vieth:

Written. And let’s, for instance, I took a basket of food and tried to distribute it to homeless people. Would they interpret me as being violating their law

Dave Roland:

Or

Erich Vieth:

So did the fact that this is a religious man, Anthony, as a religion,

Dave Roland:

This law was written extremely broadly. Basically anybody who shares food with somebody else, even if it’s like a backyard barbecue, technically is violating St. Louis City ordinances unless they get the permits from the city. That’s how the law is written. And again, the city says, oh yeah, but we don’t apply it that way. Well, you’re in kind of a catch 22 in that situation. So the Freedom Center took the position that all people should be able to share food regardless of whether they’re sharing from religious motivations at right. At the same time that we took the case for Pastor Ray, we were also engaged with Kansas City on the same issue. Only in that case the people providing food were completely secular. It was a group called Free Hot Soup, Kansas City. So people who are motivated out of a secular altruism, a desire to take care of others in their community, providing hot meals for people in need.

Fortunately, Kansas City backed down after we threatened to get involved, Kansas City left free hot soup alone. To the best of our knowledge, they’re still operating freely over there in that city without having to jump through the government’s hoops. But St. Louis continues to maintain that they have the right to shut people down. Part of the reason that we brought the claim as a religious liberty claim is because it is one of the rare situations where there is such a clear religious motivation for what Pastor Ray was doing. And in addition to the First Amendment, Missouri has a religious Freedom Restoration Act that specifies that even if a particular religious act is not compelled by someone’s religious beliefs, if it’s motivated by sincerely held religious beliefs, it is still protected under state law. And so the eighth Circuit had previously noted that the wording of Missouri’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act is even more expansive than strict scrutiny, which is what would ordinarily be applied if you’re talking about a fundamental constitutional right.

And so we thought that coming at it from a religious liberty standpoint would provide us the best possible case, best possible chance of winning that case on behalf of our client. And in point of fact, as a matter of federal constitutional law, the free exercise clause has been practically neutered since about 1990. It is only in recent years that the US Supreme Court has indicated any kind of interest in reviving protections for the free exercise of religion. And part of our goal was eventually to get a case in front of the US Supreme Court that would cause them to reconsider the circumstances under which people’s religious exercise was protected by the Constitution.

Erich Vieth:

Let me float a hypothetical towards you.

Dave Roland:

Sure. Bring it.

Erich Vieth:

This is becoming, I think, increasingly common that people who want to get married don’t want to do it within a traditional church necessarily. So somebody will sign up to be an internet pastor,

Dave Roland:

Which

Erich Vieth:

Doesn’t take much time. Not to insult your degree. I know you put real time into your theology degree, but they have done that. I know people who have done it and they love it because it’s somebody they know who is officiating over their wedding. And then there’s some states that go know that’s not a real

Dave Roland:

Religion.

Erich Vieth:

What are your thoughts on that?

Dave Roland:

This came up in the context of Jennifer and I getting married. My grandfather married most of my cousins. He was an elder in the churches of Christ, which is a small southern denomination that does not have the official ordination system that many denominations have. And in the state of Virginia where Jennifer and I got married, they require you to have a certificate from a denomination ordaining you as a minister or else the state considers your marriage invalid. We spoke to the officials in Virginia and we said, look, my grandfather has been an elder in the church for decades. It is the equivalent of ordination. By the way, we’re both constitutional attorneys. We would really recommend that you just let us go ahead with this. And they said, you know what? That’s just fine. Let your grandfather marry. We’re not going to give you any trouble about it. But there are in fact states that had made this a issue.

Erich Vieth:

I think Pennsylvania says no internet preachers. I think that’s one of the states

Dave Roland:

That’s just blatantly unconstitutional.

Erich Vieth:

I’m pretty sure that’s what it was a long time ago. And I believe it was Pennsylvania. And then there’s Maine where I performed an officiating of a wedding one time that was a while ago where they invite anyone who’s an attorney or a notary. And it is not like you are doing a deep dive on fact finding when you’re officiating over a wedding. It’s a ceremonial type role and you’re making sure that people say certain things to commit in a certain way and then you’re a witness to it. So it makes sense. A notary seems like pretty good person, at least for main. But there, there’s states that have various positions on this, and I know this is not the world’s most pressing issue, but I find it interesting about there are states that will say, you’re not good enough of a religion. You’re not enough of a religion.

Dave Roland:

Yes. I think that that’s a valid point. I want to take this in a slightly different direction if I may. One of the arguments that I made when it came to same sex marriages is that I viewed the right to same sex marriage as a religious liberty issue because there are religious groups that were perfectly willing to solemnized marriages between people of the same sex. And by saying the state’s not going to recognize that it effectively elevated one religious perspective or one religious group’s perspectives on the idea of marriage over a different religious group’s perspectives. Why should the state be involved in picking and choosing what religious group’s ideas about marriage are worthy of solemnization? And so I came at it in favor of same-sex marriage from a religious liberty perspective, and that blew a bunch of people’s minds. I remember there was a big protest over in Clayton Round about the time that California was passing one of its initiative petitions dealing with same-sex marriage, and there were a bunch of conservative people who were protesting the idea of same-sex marriage. And then there was a counter protest that was forming. Jennifer and I went down to the counter protest and I had a big sign on a poster board that said, what other sacraments do you want to regulate?

And it was funny because one of my friends who’s a conservative saw me and they had a police cordon separating the groups. And I walked up there because I wanted to show my sign and the police were about to push me away. And my friend comes over and he’s, oh, no, no, no. He’s a good guy. Let him come across. And I had to stop him. And I said, John, you need to understand I’m on the other side of this issue. And he looked at me shocked and I showed him my sign and he said, I never thought about it that way. You and I should have a beer and talk about this at some point. But I loved the idea of being able to come at some of these issues from a very unconventional standpoint and hopefully one that will help people understand why religious liberty is important in the first place.

The idea of having an unconventional perspective on the world is a cherished one. It’s one of the things that made the United States stand out. Europe prior to the foundation of the United States was intensely religiously divided, and it was full of religious conflict. And people look to America as a haven for unusual, unconventional religious ideas. The Mormon church formed in the United States, and even they face great persecution, but now they’re kind of a mainstay of American society. People make fun of Mormons a lot, but no one would doubt that they’re an important and cherished part of American society at this point. And that’s one of the virtues of religious liberty is it allows unusual ideas to be tested, and if they’re found to have value to flourish, we should be celebrating that it’s something that we should be cherishing and valuing instead of something that we should be trying to diminish.

Erich Vieth:

This is not really in line with what we’ve talked about, but it seems to be tangential to many of the things we talked about. We are in the middle of a huge culture cultural battle in this country. Many people refuse to talk to the other side,

Dave Roland:

And I

Erich Vieth:

Know that you’ve taken some strong positions on many issues. I’m just curious, if you were in a position of power and I influence, and you are to some extent, what would you suggest to bring the country together to have the kinds of conversations like you and your friend? Let’s have a beer. Let’s talk. How can we get more people to be willing to say that? Let’s have a beer. Let’s talk. We disagree. It’ll be a good thing to have a discussion.

Dave Roland:

One of the virtues that I try to cultivate is humility Learned Hand is a great American jurist who wrote some powerful ideas back in his day. He said, the spirit of liberty is the spirit that’s not too sure that it’s right, and it’s a magnificent speech. I encourage readers to look it up, Google it, read it, it’s wonderful. But it talks about how the idea of liberty is rooted in an understanding that you may not always have the right answer. And by engaging in conversation with other people and understanding that you may not always have the right answer, it will allow for an exchange of ideas so that number one, your understanding of your own position will be sharpened. Number two, you may come to the conclusion that the position that you had previously held was inadequate in some way, and you can adjust your position accordingly.

But understanding our own fallibility I think is crucial for getting along with others. Another thing that I have brought up to some very influential people is that I try and always remember that by and large, we all want the same things. We all want to live in a safe, peaceful, and prosperous society. We have some very different ideas about how to accomplish that. One of the things that bothers me most is the vilification of political opponents. One of the things that we talked about in another part of this conversation is I believe that almost all public servants really intend to try and do some good for society. There may be a handful who are after personal glory or authority, but I think most everyone really wants to do good for society. And if we keep that in mind and we don’t run people down and say, well, you’re just trying to bring America down, you’re trying to tear America apart, if we remember that they probably want very much the same thing as we do.

They just disagree on how to get there, then we can have that conversation about why I think that my approach is more likely to get us to the goal as opposed to their approach. But it keeps the conversation centered in our mutual humanity. And I think that that’s what we miss so much, especially when we’re arguing with people online. When we’re arguing with people online, we don’t confront them face to face. We’re not put in a position where there are any consequences to insulting or degrading this other person. We may not have any actual direct relationship with them, and so we feel that there’s no cost to tear them down. And that’s a recipe for disaster. That’s a recipe for the kind of poison discourse that we get on social media. And so if I was in a position to influence people, because I wouldn’t make a law about it, I’m not about that, Eric, but if I could influence people, I would ask them to remember that we all generally want the same things, and so we should not think that we should have a presumption of goodwill. Now sometimes there will be people who sacrifice that assumption. I can think of a few politicians who I no longer give any presumption of goodwill in the way that they go about things, but I think that that should be the exception rather than the rule. And the sooner we remember what it’s like to interact with each other on a personal level, I think the sooner that our politics will settle down and we’ll see the kind of useful and beneficial exchange of ideas that our founders envisioned when they gave us this republic.

Erich Vieth:

Let me end with this one last question. If someone wants to get in touch with you to talk about a case, how do they do it? And I know we’ve talked about some kinds of cases you do handle. Are there some kinds of cases you would just like to mention that you don’t handle certain other sorts of things?

Dave Roland:

So I’ve mentioned that the Freedom Center worked with extremely limited resources, and because of that, we have a screening process for potential cases. If someone’s interested in learning more about what the Freedom Center does or in having us consider a potential case, you can go to mo freedom.org. That’s M-O-F-R-E-E-D-O m.org. And we have a potential case form at mo freedom.org/help. In that potential case form, it spells out certain kinds of cases that we just don’t get involved with. So in all of our cases, we’re going to have a government defendant. We don’t sue ordinary private citizens. We don’t sue homeowners associations. We very rarely take on criminal cases. We’re not completely opposed to it, but it’s going to be a extraordinarily rare exception that we would take on a criminal case. But if someone is interested in having us consider a case, we do ask them to fill out a potential case form and email us their answers.

Now, here’s the other element to this. Last year we got 80 plus potential case requests. We can only take on at maximum a half dozen or so cases at any given time. We can’t manage more than that. And so one of the things we have to say is please don’t call to talk about a potential case on the phone because if we did that, that’s all we would ever do. And we cannot respond to everybody who submits a potential case request because again, if we did, that’s all we would ever do. And so if someone submits a case and it’s one that we consider possible, I will reach out and then we can discuss some of the details of it and what the Freedom Center might be able to do in terms of helping. But generally speaking, if you want us to consider a case, we need you to submit a potential case form, and I do guarantee we look at all of them that come in.

Erich Vieth:

This has been a deep and wide series of conversations, and I really appreciate you coming in to tell us about the work you do and Jennifer does at the Freedom Center of Missouri. I have no doubt that our audience will find this all very interesting. So thank you again for joining us for these episodes.

Dave Roland:

It has been my pleasure, Eric. Thank you so much for having me.

Erich Vieth:

Great. This has been another episode of The Jury Is Out. I’m Eric Beth. See you next time.

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