Plaintiff took off his shirt at airport security, and the text of the Fourth Amendment was written on his chest. Wearing only shorts and socks, he cooperated with the screening process, and he was arrested and handcuffed for disorderly conduct. He stated a claim for First Amendment retaliation against the TSA officers and local police who arrested him. Tobey v. Jones, 706 F.3d 379 (4th Cir. 2013):
The facts:
In anticipation that he might be subjected to enhanced screening, Mr. Tobey had written the text of the Fourth Amendment on his chest as he believed AIT scanning was unconstitutional. Before proceeding through the AIT unit, Mr. Tobey calmly placed his sweatpants and t-shirt on the conveyor belt, leaving him in running shorts and socks, revealing the text of the Fourth Amendment written on his chest. Agent Smith advised Mr. Tobey he need not remove his clothes. Mr. Tobey calmly responded that he wished to express his view that TSA’s enhanced screening procedures were unconstitutional.
At this point, Agent Smith radioed for assistance. As commanded by her supervisor, Appellant-Agent Jones, Agent Smith ordered Mr. Tobey to remain in front of the AIT unit. Agent Jones and unknown Appellant-Agent Doe then asked RIC police for assistance. At no point did Mr. Tobey refuse to undergo the enhanced screening procedures. Nor did he decline to do anything requested of him. In fact, Mr. Tobey alleges that he “remained quiet, composed, polite, cooperative and complied with the requests of agents and officers.”
RIC police officers Vann and Mason arrived on the scene and immediately handcuffed and arrested Mr. Tobey. None of the TSA agents informed RIC police of what occurred at the screening station, nor did RIC police ask. Officer Vann escorted Mr. Tobey to a side area and informed him he was under arrest for creating a public disturbance. Agent Doe searched Mr. Tobey’s belongings, removing unidentified items. Officer Mason then collected Mr. Tobey’s belongings with assistance from Agents Smith and Doe.
Mr. Tobey was then taken to the RIC police station where Officer Vann and other officers questioned Mr. Tobey and threatened him with various criminal sanctions. Mr. Tobey was eventually charged with disorderly conduct in a public place. See Va. Code Ann. § 18.2-415. The officers later released Mr. Tobey after consulting with an Air Marshal from the Federal Air Marshal’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. In total, Mr. Tobey was held for over an hour. Mr. Tobey boarded the plane without further incident. The Commonwealth Attorney for Henrico County subsequently dropped the disorderly conduct charge.
He survives qualified immunity analysis:
These legal conclusions are well supported by the facts laid out in Mr. Tobey’s complaint. Mr. Tobey alleges that he removed his sweatpants and t-shirt to reveal the text of the Fourth Amendment on his chest. Appellants told him that he did not have to remove his clothing, but he responded that he wished to express his views that the screening process was unconstitutional. Immediately after this assertion, Appellants engaged RIC police officers to arrest him.
They handcuffed and seized him with no questioning and without telling him why he was being arrested. In short, Mr. Tobey’s complaint satisfies all three elements of a First Amendment claim as he alleges: (1) he engaged in constitutionally protected non-violent protest; (2) he was seized as a result of the protest; and (3) the temporal proximity of his peaceful protest and his arrest, unsupported by probable cause, shows Appellants engaged in impermissible retaliation. Cf. Trulock v. Freeh, 275 F.3d 391, 405 (4th Cir. 2001) (observing that “the timing of the search raises an inference of retaliatory motive”). The factual allegations in the complaint, viewed as a whole, have “facial plausibility” that “allow[] the court to draw reasonable inference that the defendant[s] [are] liable for misconduct alleged.” Iqbal, 556 U.S. at 678 (citing Twombly, 550 U.S. at 556). This is not a case where the complaint is merely “threadbare recitals of a cause of action’s elements supported by mere conclusory statements.” Id. These factual allegations, when viewed as accurate, adequately support Mr. Tobey’s legal assertion that he was unlawfully seized in retaliation for exercising his protected First Amendment rights.
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"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It isn't, and they don't." —Me
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well." –Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw), Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things (1868) (erroneously attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson, among others)
“I am still learning.” —Domenico Giuntalodi (but misattributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (common phrase throughout 1500's)).
"Love work; hate mastery over others; and avoid intimacy with the government."
—Shemaya, in the Thalmud
"It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
—Charles Dickens, “The Old Curiosity Shop ... With a Frontispiece. From a Painting by Geo. Cattermole, Etc.” 255 (1848)
"A system of law that not only makes certain conduct criminal, but also lays down rules for the conduct of the authorities, often becomes complex in its application to individual cases, and will from time to time produce imperfect results, especially if one's attention is confined to the particular case at bar. Some criminals do go free because of the necessity of keeping government and its servants in their place. That is one of the costs of having and enforcing a Bill of Rights. This country is built on the assumption that the cost is worth paying, and that in the long run we are all both freer and safer if the Constitution is strictly enforced." —Williams v. Nix, 700 F. 2d 1164, 1173 (8th Cir. 1983) (Richard Sheppard Arnold, J.), rev'd Nix v. Williams, 467 US. 431 (1984).
"The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence." —Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 659 (1961).
"Any costs the exclusionary rule are costs imposed directly by the Fourth Amendment."
—Yale Kamisar, 86 Mich.L.Rev. 1, 36 n. 151 (1987).
"There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater than it is today." — Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 39 (1968) (Douglas, J., dissenting).
"The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their property." —Entick v. Carrington, 19 How.St.Tr. 1029, 1066, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (C.P. 1765)
"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people. And so, while we are concerned here with a shabby defrauder, we must deal with his case in the context of what are really the great themes expressed by the Fourth Amendment." —United States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 69 (1950) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting)
"The course of true law pertaining to searches and seizures, as enunciated here, has not–to put it mildly–run smooth." —Chapman v. United States, 365 U.S. 610, 618 (1961) (Frankfurter, J., concurring).
"A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a turntable." —Arizona v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 325 (1987)
"For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. ... But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected." —Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967)
“Experience should teach us to be most on guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” —United States v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1925) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)
“Liberty—the freedom from unwarranted intrusion by government—is as easily lost through insistent nibbles by government officials who seek to do their jobs too well as by those whose purpose it is to oppress; the piranha can be as deadly as the shark.” —United States v. $124,570, 873 F.2d 1240, 1246 (9th Cir. 1989)
"You can't always get what you want / But if you try sometimes / You just might find / You get what you need." —Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, Let it Bleed (album, 1969)
"In Germany, they first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came for me–and by that time there was nobody left to speak up."
—Martin Niemöller (1945) [he served seven years in a concentration camp]
“Children grow up thinking the adult world is ordered, rational, fit for purpose. It’s crap. Becoming a man is realising that it’s all rotten. Realising how to celebrate that rottenness, that’s freedom.” – John le Carré, The Night Manager (1993), line by Richard Roper
"The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers, is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime." —Johnson v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 13-14 (1948)
The book was dedicated in the first (1982) and sixth (2025) editions to Justin William Hall (1975-2025). He was three when this project started in 1978.
