Michael Hartman, Frank Kormann, Pierce Mcintosh, Norman Robbins, and Robert Edwards v. William G. Moore, JR. (547 U.S. 250)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided April 26, 2006 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 547 U.S. 250 · 126 S. Ct. 1695
- Decided
- April 26, 2006
- Term
- October Term 2005
- Vote
- 5–2
- Majority author
- Justice Souter
- Issue area
- First Amendment
- Disposition
- Reversed and remanded
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
Opinion excerpt
Justice Souter delivered the opinion of the Court. This is a Bivens action against criminal investigators for inducing prosecution in retaliation for speech. The question is whether the complaint states an actionable violation of the First Amendment without alleging an absence of probable cause to support the underlying criminal charge. We hold that want of probable cause must be alleged and proven. I In the 1980’s, respondent William G. Moore, Jr., was the chief executive of Recognition Equipment Inc. (REI), which manufactured a multiline optical character reader for interpreting'multiple lines of text. Although REI had received some $50 million from the United States Postal Service to develop this technology for reading and sorting mail, the Postmaster General and other top officials of the Postal Service were urging mailers to use nine-digit zip codes (Zip + 4), which would provide enough routing information on one line of text to allow single-line scanning machines to sort mail automatically by reading just that line. Besides Moore, who obviously stood to gain financially from' the adoption of multiline technology, some Members of Congress and Government research officers had reservations about the Postal Service’s Zip + 4 policy and its intended reliance on single-line readers. Critics maligned single-line scanning technology, objected to the foreign sources of…
Excerpt of a 29,363-character opinion. The full text and citation network load in the interactive viewer above.