O’Keefe v. Chisholm

SWAT teams—police units equipped with military-style weaponry and trained to deal with the most dangerous of criminals—were first created police realized that patrolmen equipped with revolvers and batons are generally able to keep the peace, they lack the resources and skills to deal with riots, urban terrorism, and other exotic crime. Since then, SWAT-style paramilitary units have been deployed to rescue hostages, end bank robberies, secure campuses after school shootings, and, in Wisconsin, to raid the houses and offices of people the state believed to be guilty of exercising their rights under the First Amendment. That’s right: in the last few years, SWAT raids were part of a wide-ranging (politically motivated) investigation into whether certain unknown individuals—“John Does”—were violating campaign finance laws. Some of these John Does objected and challenged the validity of the subpoenas requiring them to turn over their records to the district attorney’s office. The state trial court agreed and quashed the subpoena, finding that the state had no reason to believe that any violation of state law had occurred, or that the records taken would contain relevant evidence. Unsatisfied, the DA appealed the judge’s order. Rather than continuing this battle through the state courts, these John Does sued the state officials responsible for the investigation in federal court. They claimed that the investigation was a speech-chilling violation of their First Amendment rights and asked for a federal injunction preventing the state from pursuing the investigation. The state argued that a federal law—the Anti-Injunction Act—prevents federal courts from ordering states to abandon in-progress criminal cases. Nevertheless, the district court issued an order stopping the SWAT-style fishing expedition, relying on a series of Supreme Court cases holding that the AIA doesn’t apply where the prosecution is known by the state to be baseless, is part of a campaign of harassment, or involves the enforcement of a blatantly unconstitutional law. The judge concluded that Wisconsin’s campaign-finance laws, as well as the methods used to enforce them, violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reversed the district court’s order, however, concluding that since the state campaign-finance laws had not yet been declared unconstitutional—and their constitutionality was not directly before the district court—the AIA exceptions didn’t apply and the injunction was improper. In short, Wisconsin will be allowed to continue its investigation, the constitutionality of which is immune from legal challenge in federal court. In effect, the Seventh Circuit held that that under the AIA, the only time defendants can challenge the constitutionality of a state’s criminal laws is “when no state prosecution [is] pending.”