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Civil Rights — freedom of speech — qualified immunity

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//May 27, 2014//

Civil Rights — freedom of speech — qualified immunity

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//May 27, 2014//

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U.S. Supreme Court

Civil

Civil Rights — freedom of speech — qualified immunity

Where protesters’ location posed a potential security risk to the president, their displacement did not violate the First Amendment.

The protesters allege that, in directing their displacement, the agents acted not to ensure the President’s safety, but to insulate the President from their message. These allegations are undermined by a map of the area, which shows that, because of the protesters’ location, they posed a potential security risk to the President, while the supporters, because of their location, did not. The protesters’ counterarguments are unavailing. They urge that, had the agents’ professed interest in the President’s safety been sincere, the agents would have screened or removed from the premises persons already at the Inn when the President arrived. But staff, other diners, and Inn guests were on the premises before the agents knew of the President’s plans, and thus could not have anticipated seeing the President, no less causing harm to him. The agents also could keep a close watch on the relatively small number of people already inside the Inn, surveillance that would have been impossible for the hundreds of people outside the Inn. A White House manual directs the President’s advance team to “work with the Secret Service . . . to designate a protest area . . . preferably not in view of the event site or motorcade route.” The manual guides the conduct of the political advance team, not the Secret Service, whose own written guides explicitly prohibit “agents from discriminating between anti-government and pro-government demonstrators.” Even assuming, as the protesters maintain, that other agents, at other times and places, have assisted in shielding the President from political speech, this case is scarcely one in which the agents lacked a valid security reason for their actions. Moreover, because individual government officials “cannot beheld liable” in a Bivens suit “unless they themselves acted [unconstitutionally],” Iqbal, 556 U. S., at 683, this Court declines to infer from alleged instances of misconduct on the part of particular agents an unwritten Secret Service policy to suppress disfavored expression, and then attribute that supposed policy to all field-level operatives.

711 F. 3d 941, reversed.

13-115 Wood v. Moss

Ginsburg, J.

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