The Unlicensed Park Service

A member of a door-to-door religious movement applied to a city council for a licence to hold religious meetings in a public park on two summer Sundays. The council refused, and the refusal was later accepted to have been arbitrary and unreasonable. He held the meetings in the park anyway and was prosecuted under the city ordinance requiring a licence for such gatherings. He was convicted and fined $20. The prosecution said that the proper answer to a wrongful refusal was to go to court to force the council to grant the licence, not to break the ordinance. The man argued that because the denial of his application was plainly unlawful, he could not be punished for exercising his rights to worship and speak without it.