Court Cases

Accountability NOW is a group of volunteers who have been holding a permitted, 24/7 anti-Trump vigil on National Park Service (NPS) land in Washington, D.C., for months. After they erected signs saying "Trump raped little girls,” and “Kids, if your parents are MAGA, they love child rapists,” NPS demanded they remove the signs because they are “obscene,” and therefore, not protected by the First Amendment. But the signs are not obscene. Legal obscenity is an extremely narrow exception to the First Amendment’s protection and does not apply to signs like these. For example, the media has extensively covered Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes on TV and online, but those reports do not satisfy the legal test for obscenity, which is designed to capture things like hardcore pornography that have no artistic or other value. This case shows why the test is so strict: If politicians could stop you from accusing them of sexual misconduct by saying that the accusation is obscene, they could avoid accountability. That’s what the First Amendment prevents. We are asking the court to prohibit NPS from revoking its demonstration permit on this trumped-up ground. We hope that this lawsuit will remind government officials to take Americans’ First Amendment rights seriously. After seeking unsuccessfully to persuade the government that it should reverse its position, we filed a motion for a preliminary injunction on May 26. At 5 a.m. the next morning, Park Police officers came to our client’s demonstration and informed them that a flag they were flying, which said “8647,” was a threat to the President and must be removed or they would be violating their permit. That afternoon we filed an application for a temporary restraining order, asking the court to prohibit the government from taking action against the demonstration if it resumed displaying that flag. On May 28 the court heard argument on our motion, and on Monday June 1 it was granted, ordering the government not to take action against the demonstration for flying an “8647” flag. That temporary order can last only 28 days, so on June 10 we filed a motion for a preliminary injunction, seeking an order that will last through the litigation of the case prohibiting the government from retaliating against the demonstration for flying the flag or displaying the posters about Trump’s alleged sex crimes. On June 29, the court issued a final decision in the case, finding that the facts were undisputed and no further proceedings were needed. The court concluded that “both sets of materials represent core protected speech, and, as a result, the NPS may not compel their removal or condition Plaintiff’s continuing entitlement to a demonstration permit on Plaintiff’s refraining from that speech.” Accordingly, the court issued a permanent injunction protecting Accountability NOW’s right to display the rape signs and the 8647 flag.

The Arab Student Union’s activities would not be disruptive; they are the same kinds of activities in which other student clubs engage. Their speech has been suppressed because the school does not want their viewpoint to be heard.

Apparently recognizing that a law making “communicat[ion]” a crime risks the prosecution of speech protected by the First Amendment, the law provides that “[t]his section does not apply to constitutionally protected activity.” But the D.C. Court of Appeals has never explained what that means.

The ACLU. ACLU-DC, and ACLU-MI filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of Ahmad Chebli, a Michigan father of two who the U.S. government wrongly placed on the No-Fly List over two years ago, after he refused to become an FBI informant.

The ACLU-DC filed a formal complaint on behalf of a protestor who was injured by the National Guard’s use of low-flying helicopters to intimidate racial justice demonstrators.