Supreme Court Lets Street Preacher Challenge Protest Limits (1)

An evangelical street preacher may challenge a Mississippi city ordinance restricting where protests may occur notwithstanding his prior conviction under the law, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously.

Writing for the court on Friday, Justice Elena Kagan said the court’s prior decision in Heck v. Humphrey, which held Section 1983 civil rights suits couldn’t be used to collaterally attack convictions or sentences, didn’t bar such suits seeking purely prospective relief.

Gabriel Olivier’s suit didn’t challenge the validity of his sentence, Kagan wrote, but sought wholly prospective relief “only to be free from prosecutions for future violations” of the ordinance.

Olivier sued to block enforcement of a local ordinance restricting protests near a performance venue in Brandon, Mississippi. Lower courts dismissed his suit, finding it was barred by Heck because Olivier had previously been convicted under the same ordinance.

In 1994’s Heck, authored by Justice Antonin Scalia, the majority said civil rights suits couldn’t be used as an end-run around the federal habeas statute. Where success in a civil rights suit would necessarily imply the underlying conviction or sentence was unconstitutional, Scalia wrote, petitioners must first show they had successfully challenged them.

The language the city, and lower courts, had relied on from Heck “swept a bit too broad,” Kagan wrote. The court on Friday clarified that Heck had not been meant to reach suits like Olivier’s.

“Both in the allegations made, and in the relief sought, the suit is all future-oriented—even if, as a kind of byproduct, success in it shows that something past should not have occurred,” Kagan wrote. “The Heck court did not consider such a suit, and the Heck language was not meant to address it.”

Olivier was represented by the First Liberty Institute and Allyson Ho, a partner at Gibson Dunn.

The City of Brandon was represented by G. Todd Butler, of Phelps Dunbar.

The case is Gabriel Olivier v. City of Brandon, U.S., No. 24-993.