A Conway attorney filed a lawsuit Thursday against officials in Pulaski County, arguing that he was wrongly denied entry into one of the county's courthouses while carrying a handgun.
The complaint, filed by patent attorney Chris Corbitt, seeks to test the limits of a decades-old law banning firearms from courthouses, with exceptions for bailiffs and other "officers of the court." Corbitt argues that definition includes attorneys.
"This is the test case. I know of no other prior litigation on the issue," said Robert Steinbuch, who is representing Corbitt.
The matter began earlier this month, Corbitt said, when he was trying to enter the Pulaski County District Courthouse adjacent to the jail in order to file paperwork with the clerk. A concealed-carry licensee with an "enhanced" permit, Corbitt said he usually stores his weapon in his car when going to court, but forgot he had it Jan. 3 as he walked into the courthouse.
According to his complaint, Corbitt asked a security guard if he could take the gun into the building, and was told he could not.
Corbitt said he then tried to leave to take his gun back to the car, but was told to sit down while a security guard summoned a detective from the sheriff's office. Corbitt was eventually allowed to return to his car, he said, after he showed the officers portions of Arkansas Code Annotated 5-23-122, which contains the language about "officers of the court." He was not allowed to take the gun into the courthouse, however.
Corbitt said the security officer and sheriff's staff acted professionally toward him while he explained his position.
"They never saw [the gun]," he added.
The lawsuit, filed in Pulaski County Circuit Court, names Sheriff Eric Higgins and County Judge Barry Hyde as defendants. Both declined to comment.
While Steinbuch said the lawsuit is intended to spur the courts into addressing the issue, it is not the first time attorneys have questioned the state's courtroom prohibition on handguns.
W. Whitfield Hyman, an attorney in Fort Smith, attracted attention in early 2018 when he sent letters to officials in five counties asking to be allowed to carry a gun into their courthouses. Only three of the counties responded, Hyman said in an interview Friday, while others ignored his request.
None allowed him to take his gun to court, and Hyman said he never followed up on the matter.
Both Hyman and Corbitt pointed to a 2017 law, Act 1087, as the basis for their argument that they should be allowed to carry weapons into courthouses. That law decreased the penalty for illegally carrying a weapon into a courthouse, but the language referencing an "officer of the court," actually dates back further to Act 910 of 1997, according to legislative records.
One of the authors of the 1997 law, former state Rep. Sandra Rogers, D-El Dorado, said Friday the law was written in response to concerns about courthouse shootings, and was meant to include attorneys.
"That was written so that attorneys could carry guns into the courtroom," Rogers recalled.
The author of the 2017 amendment to the law, state Rep. Bob Ballinger, R Berryville, agreed, saying, "I don't know how else you could interpret" the language. Ballinger, a practicing attorney, said he has not personally attempted to carry a firearm inside a courthouse.
According to Black's Law Dictionary, an officer of the court "typically" refers to a "judge, clerk, bailiff, sheriff or the like, but the term also applied to a lawyer, who is obliged to obey court rules and who owes a duty of candor to the court."
Corbitt said he usually carries a concealed handgun wherever he goes and decided to test the law after being turned away at the courthouse. His attorney, Steinbuch, said he was prepared to take the case all the way to the Arkansas Supreme Court, if his arguments prove unsuccessful in lower courts.
The case has been assigned to Circuit Court Judge Chris Piazza.
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