Olivier v. City of Brandon, Mississippi

Born in Bolton, Mississippi, Gabriel Oliver is a street preacher who liked to share his religious messages on the sidewalks near an outdoor amphitheatre in Brandon, MS. In 2019, lawmakers in Brandon passed an ordinance that confined protests and “demonstrations” to certain areas whenever the amphitheatre was hosting an event.

In 2021, Gabriel Oliver was arrested for violating this mandate; he pleaded no contest and paid a $304 fine. Later, Oliver sued the city, citing federal civil rights statute, 42 U.S.C. § 1983, seeking not to undo his conviction but simply an injunction and declaration that the ordinance was unconstitutional so he could preach there again without being arrested.

Both the district court and the Fifth Circuit dismissed the suit before ever reaching the First Amendment question. The courts arrived at this conclusion based on the precedents of Heck v. Humphrey (1944). 

This ruling bars using § 1983 to attack a conviction indirectly instead of through habeas corpus. The Fifth Circuit's own judges split sharply on rehearing the case en banc, and a different circuit had reached the opposite conclusion in a similar case, prompting the Supreme Court to grant certiorari to resolve the conflict.

The Court ended up hearing oral arguments on December 3rd of 2025, later issuing a unanimous opinion authored by Justice Kagan. The ruling came just three months after arguments were heard: March 20th, 2026.

The city argued that because a win for Olivier would suggest the ordinance he was convicted under was invalid all along, his suit was really a backdoor attack on his conviction. Additionally, the precedent cited by the city was made to specifically prevent a situation like this.

Olivier argued that he wasn't asking any court to erase his conviction, award him damages, or free him from custody, and that Heck has never applied to lawsuits seeking only forward-looking relief against a law's future enforcement, a category of suit the Court had long allowed even for people previously punished under the challenged law.

The Court sided with Oliver, deciding that Heck v. Humphrey has no bearing on a § 1983 suit that seeks purely prospective relief. Kagan explained that the case fell within § 1983’s “heartland”: a citizen facing a credible threat of future prosecution challenging a law's constitutionality going forward.

The Fifth Circuit's judgment was reversed and the case sent back down so Olivier's First Amendment claim can finally be heard on the merits. Beyond Olivier's own case, the ruling matters for anyone who has ever been fined or convicted under a law they believe is unconstitutional: it confirms that a past conviction does not automatically lock a person out of federal court when all they're seeking is protection from being punished under that same law again in the future.