The Supreme Court said today that Secret Service agents cannot be sued over a 2006 arrest of a man who had heckled then-Vice President Dick Cheney. In a unanimous ruling, the justices said the law on alleged retaliatory arrests is too vague to permit a lawsuit to go forward.
The narrow ruling would appear to affect only this case stemming from a 2006 incident in Beaver Creek, Colorado.
As Cheney shook hands at a shopping mall, a man named Steven Howards got in line, and, as he approached the vice president, told him the Bush administration's Iraq policies were "disgusting."
As NPR reports, accounts differ on what happened next: