Stop Trying to Make Carroll Happen: What a 1968 Rally Case Actually Holds

One Michigan attorney keeps reaching for a 1968 case to justify silencing whoever’s in front of him that week. Here’s what the case actually says.

I keep seeing the same case cited, over and over, in filing after filing, restraining order after restraining order, aimed at whoever happens to be standing in front of it that week. Carroll v. President and Commissioners of Princess Anne. 1968. Every time, it lands like a trump card. Every time, I go back and read the actual case, and every time I find the same gap between what Carroll says and what it’s being used to do.

So let’s actually look at it. And to look at it honestly, we have to start before the rally the Supreme Court opinion describes, because Carroll didn’t arrive in Princess Anne out of nowhere.

The Road to Princess Anne

Three weeks before the ex parte order that reached the Supreme Court, the National States Rights Party ran three rallies in Patterson Park in Baltimore, on July 25, 27, and 28, 1966. The permit on file wasn’t in the party’s name. It was issued to something called the Citizens of Brailsford Committee, a name that never once appeared on stage. Every speaker and every piece of literature at those rallies identified the National States Rights Party as the actual sponsor. Joseph Carroll, Connie Lynch, and Richard Norton, the same men who would show up in Princess Anne days later, delivered speeches Maryland’s courts would go on to describe as inflammatory language directed at Black and Jewish residents. All three were convicted of inciting a riot.

They didn’t go home after that. Maryland’s Court of Appeals, reviewing the Princess Anne injunction the following year, put it in one plain sentence: it was not mere chance which brought the appellants to Princess Anne. The court noted that Princess Anne sits roughly forty miles from Cambridge, the seat of Dorchester County, where the Maryland National Guard had been deployed for over a year, 1963 into 1964, during the Eastern Shore’s own civil rights confrontations. This was not a region cooling down. It was a region the National States Rights Party appears to have chosen precisely because it wasn’t, a week after walking out of a Baltimore courtroom on riot charges.

When Carroll and the party’s attorney, J.B. Stoner, arrived in Princess Anne and asked the state police whether any law barred them from setting up a sound system on the courthouse steps, the troop commander told them no such law existed. So the first rally went forward, under police protection, roughly sixty state troopers standing by. It was the second night, after the speeches, after the crowd, after everyone in that courthouse and that county knew exactly who these men were and what they had just been convicted of forty miles away, that the town went to a judge without telling anyone and got the order silencing them.

That’s the case the Supreme Court decided two years later. Not a hypothetical. Not a first offense. A group with a documented, adjudicated history of inciting a riot in the same state weeks earlier, arriving in an already-destabilized region.

And shockingly, the Court still said the order couldn’t stand without notice.

What Carroll Is

In August 1966, the National States Rights Party held its first Princess Anne rally. The speeches were, in the Supreme Court’s own words, aggressively and militantly racist, aimed first at Black residents and then at Jewish residents. A second rally was announced for the following night. Local officials went to court and got an ex parte restraining order: no notice to the speakers, no hearing, nothing. The order stopped the second rally cold.

Two years later, the Supreme Court threw the order out. Not because the speech was protected. Not because Princess Anne was wrong to worry about what would happen if the rally went forward. The Court never decided either of those questions, and it said so twice. The order fell because of how it was obtained: in secret, with no chance for the other side to show up and be heard.

That’s the whole holding. Before the government can silence someone’s future speech, it has to give that person notice and a chance to participate, unless it can show that notice was actually impossible. Carroll doesn’t say ex parte speech restraints are illegal. It says the government has to prove it couldn’t have done better before it skips the hearing.

The Part Everyone Skips

Here’s the sentence that gets left on the cutting room floor almost every time Carroll shows up in a Michigan filing: the Court expressly refused to decide whether the rally could have been stopped at all on those facts. Twice. Once near the top of the opinion, once in the closing paragraph. The Court wasn’t protecting the content of what the National States Rights Party said. It was protecting the process by which anyone’s speech, including theirs, gets restrained.

And there’s a line in there that matters more than the holding itself. The Court warned that relying only on the government’s side of the story is dangerous, because prosecuting officials have a special interest in the outcome. That’s not a throwaway. That’s the entire reason Carroll requires two sides in the room before a judge signs an order silencing someone.

When Misused, Carroll Becomes a Sword Rather than a Shield

In the last year, I’ve seen Carroll used as both a sword and a shield. Carroll is a warning that courts should not rely exclusively on one side’s account of events, because first, it may not even be truthful at all, and second, the petitioning party may have a special interest in the outcome rather than peace and quiet and being left alone; it could be used as a means to control or harm. And that needs to be very seriously weighed.

Carroll’s protection doesn’t turn on whether the speaker is sympathetic. If it did, it would protect nobody, because everybody thinks the person trying to silence them is the sympathetic one. The whole point of a procedural floor is that it applies before anyone gets to decide who’s likeable enough to deserve it.

Obviously people who came to town to intentionally destabilize a community and incite riots is a very different stance than someone trying to protect themselves and their family from harassment.

Where Michigan’s PPO Statute Actually Sits

Michigan’s nondomestic PPO statute lets a court check a box on a form, prohibit a named person from posting anything about the petitioner through any medium of communication, and have that order enforceable by arrest the moment it’s signed, no hearing required. The underlying stalking statutes carve out constitutionally protected activity by their own terms. The ex parte procedure is the part that doesn’t.

A federal court in the Western District of Michigan let a First Amendment challenge to exactly this mechanism survive a motion for judgment on the pleadings in 2024, in a case involving a Michigan Department of Corrections investigator who’d obtained a PPO against a subordinate for posting video and a docket sheet from the investigator’s own arraignment. That’s a narrower thing than it sounds like. It means the claim was plausible enough to proceed, not that the PPO was ultimately found unconstitutional, and the court said as much, expressly declining to reach the merits. But its reasoning on the plausibility question was blunt: if the facts in Carroll, an actual planned rally by an actual organized hate group with sixty state troopers standing by, didn’t justify an ex parte speech restraint, it’s hard to see how a Facebook post about a public employee’s criminal case would.

That’s Carroll working as designed. It’s also the same statute, the same checkbox, the same ex parte mechanism showing up again and again across different counties, different judges, different petitioners, years apart. Not one bad order from one careless judge. A procedure.

Not Every Word Is a Rally

There’s a second way Carroll gets stretched, and it runs in the opposite direction from the state’s attempt to shrink it. Instead of narrowing the case down to rallies, some filers try to widen the category of speech itself, until direct contact, threats, and proxy harassment all get filed under the same heading as the speeches in 1966, so Carroll’s protection can be claimed for conduct the case never even addressed.

Carroll is about restraints on expression. A person speaking, and a court trying to stop them from speaking again. It says nothing about a court restraining someone from following another person, showing up at their home, contacting them directly after being told to stop, or routing threats and harassment through third parties, an employer, a probation officer, a family member, so the contact looks indirect instead of direct. Michigan’s stalking statutes draw exactly that line themselves. MCL 750.411h and 750.411i cover a course of conduct involving repeated unconsented contact. MCL 750.411s covers using an online posting to generate unconsented contact from other people, sometimes called cyberstalking by proxy. None of that is Carroll’s subject matter, because none of it is a court trying to stop someone from talking about a public issue.

So when a PPO gets challenged wholesale under Carroll, the honest first question isn’t whether notice was given. It’s whether the restrained conduct was ever speech to begin with. A provision that says don’t post about the petitioner online is a different animal from a provision that says don’t show up at their house, don’t contact them through their employer, don’t route messages through the people close to them. Carroll has something to say about the first kind of provision. It has nothing to say about the second kind, because the second kind was never inside the rule the Court wrote. Folding both into one Carroll argument, and asking a court to strike an entire order because one provision might be overbroad, isn’t applying the case. It’s using its name to avoid the conduct-by-conduct analysis the case never excused anyone from doing.

The Trap in Citing Your Own Floor

Here’s where it gets genuinely strange, and where the “over and over, at everyone” pattern actually breaks something. Carroll requires a specific factual predicate before it applies: notice was not given, and the party seeking the ex parte order can’t show it was impossible to give. That’s not decoration. It’s the test.

Which means invoking Carroll isn’t a magic word. It requires the underlying facts to match. A party who had actual advance knowledge that a protective order was coming, who was told by name that a judge intended to sign one, who acknowledged that awareness in writing before the order issued, doesn’t get the benefit of a case built entirely on the absence of exactly that kind of knowledge. Carroll is not a chant. It’s a factual showing.

Why This Matters Beyond One Attorney

None of this is really about any single filing. It’s about what happens when a genuine constitutional floor gets treated as a rhetorical reflex instead of a factual test. Carroll is doing real work in Michigan right now, protecting people who actually had no notice before a court restrained their speech. That work gets harder every time the case is invoked on facts that don’t fit it, because opposing counsel and courts start reading it skeptically on sight, and the respondents who genuinely need it pay the credibility cost of the misuse.

A citation is only as strong as its facts. Carroll’s facts are specific: no notice, no showing of impossibility, an order that silenced speech before anyone heard the other side. Match those facts, and the case does exactly what it was built to do. Don’t, and it’s just gross misapplication.