This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, October 14th,

2024. I'm Keeland Brown.

When is an arrest retaliatory?

The Supreme Court now appears to want to make sure that individuals

who are arrested aren't being subjected to the capricious whims of local government.

I spoke last week with Patrick Giacomo of the Institute for Justice about retaliatory arrests

and what they require.

If you don't mind just as a bit of background for our discussion today, let's talk about Gonzales v Trevino, which is kind of an odd case and it's not

really straightforward. There are some complicating factors here, but walk us through that case and what the Supreme Court held in that case.

Yeah, so Gonzales versus Trevino was an IJ case that my colleague Anya argued this past spring

that the US Supreme Court decided in June about pretextual arrests in violation of the First Amendment.

And so essentially what the case was about

is whether the existence of probable cause

that someone had committed any crime would be sufficient to prevent them

from bringing a claim that their arrest was actually made because of something

they said. And so in that case we represent a woman named Sylvia Gonzalez who was a member of city council in a small town called Castle Hills, Texas.

And she spearheaded a petition drive to remove the city manager from his position and because of that the mayor and his

friends were not big fans of Sylvia and they engineered her arrest and ultimately

what they were able to concoct after several months of

investigation by a lawyer who was dubbed a special detective they decided that

the misplacing of some documents on the City Council dais. In fact the petitions that

Sylvia had spearheaded to remove the city manager ended up in Sylvia's binder and that she

...