The Aftershocks of IJ’s Supreme Court Win Against Government Retaliation

Some U.S. Supreme Court victories—including the two featured on recent covers of this magazine—come with fanfare after months of exhaustive briefing and oral argument prep followed by many more months of agonized waiting.
Others come quietly, announced with a few lines in an order list. The Court doesn’t write an opinion. There is no oral argument or rigorous briefing schedule for sleep-deprived lawyers to explain their positions in excruciating detail. Instead, the Court says three words: Granted, Vacated, Remanded. With this “GVR,” it announces that the challenged decision is wrong and orders the lower court to start over.
This is exactly what happened in one of IJ’s cases during the first day of this Supreme Court term. Fresh from summer recess, the Court granted IJ’s petition for certiorari in Murphy v. Schmitt; vacated the 8th Circuit’s ruling barring a claim for retaliatory arrest; and remanded the case back to the 8th Circuit to reconsider it in light of the Court’s decision in another IJ case, Gonzalez v. Trevino.
As you read in August, our previous victory means Sylvia Gonzalez will have a chance to hold her tormentors accountable. Now, with three simple words, Mason Murphy also gets another shot at his lawsuit.
Mason’s lawsuit began three years ago, when he was minding his own business, walking on the shoulder of a rural Missouri road. A police officer, Michael Schmitt, stopped Mason and ordered that he identify himself. Mason calmly declined, explaining that he was doing nothing wrong and therefore was not required to disclose his name. Nine minutes into the encounter, Schmitt handcuffed Mason and took him to jail.
At the jail, Schmitt struggled to come up with a crime to justify Mason’s arrest. Bodycam footage shows Schmitt complaining that Mason “ran his mouth off” and asking a colleague to help him think of a charge.
“What can I give him?” Schmitt asks.
“I don’t know,” the colleague responds, “That’s gonna be a tricky one.”
Ultimately, Mason spent two hours in jail before Schmitt released him, without a charge.
Armed with the bodycam footage, Mason sued Schmitt for a pretextual arrest. As the video showed, Schmitt was upset with Mason for refusing to identify himself (that’s speech protected by the First Amendment) and punished him by throwing him in jail. But the 8th Circuit threw out Mason’s lawsuit. Like the 5th Circuit in Sylvia’s case, it held that because there was technically probable cause for the arrest (Missouri law criminalizes walking on the wrong side of a road), Mason couldn’t sue, no matter how compelling the evidence of pretext.
Fortunately for Mason, by the time his petition got to the Justices, this was no longer the law. In Gonzalez, the Supreme Court made it clear that First Amendment violations cannot be so easily laundered through probable cause. When a plaintiff can show that their arrest was unusual—as Sylvia and Mason both did—it indicates that the arrest might be pretextual and entitles the plaintiff to their day in court.
Mason was not the only one to benefit from the new precedent. The following week, the Supreme Court GVRed Villarreal v. Alaniz—a case litigated by our friends at FIRE and in which IJ submitted an amicus brief—“in light of Gonzalez v. Trevino.”
All in all, GVRs are a rare but significant reaffirmation of how the law has been transformed by IJ. Barely four months after Sylvia’s victory, her case has already resonated far and wide, helping others in their quest for justice.
Anya Bidwell is an IJ senior attorney and co-leader of IJ’s Project on Immunity and Accountability.
Related Cases

First Amendment | First Amendment Retaliation | Immunity and Accountability
Gonzalez v. Trevino
After she won her election to city council, Sylvia Gonzalez immediately began getting harassed by city officials whom she had criticized in the past. It got so bad she was even arrested and thrown in…

Immunity and Accountability | Private Property
Murphy v. Schmitt
Have you ever heard of someone being arrested and sent to jail for walking on the wrong side of the road? Probably not — because police officers never, or almost never, arrest people for such…
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