Victoria McCartney v. Taylor L. McGowan

Case Overview Case: Victoria McCartney; Shane McCartney; Guerrilla Entertainment LLC d/b/a Midwest Drone Racing v. Taylor L. McGowan, in his official capacity as Martin County Attorney, or his successor; Martin County; City of Welcome; Welcome Historical Society Court: United States District Court, District of Minnesota Judge: Michael J. Davis, United States District Judge Date: November 14, 2025 Docket: Civil File No. 25-02245 (MJD/DJF)

Background and Facts Plaintiffs Shane and Victoria McCartney have lived in Martin County, Minnesota for approximately five years. They and their business, Guerrilla Entertainment LLC (doing business as Midwest Drone Racing), became involved in a community promotional program involving painted cement pig statues. After the City of Welcome blocked placement of the McCartneys' donated pig statue at the Welcome Historical Society Museum — a museum housed in a city-owned building — a series of disputes arose between the McCartneys and city officials, including conflicts over voting rights, policing, detachment petitions, and utility threats.

On March 4, 2024, at a Fox Lake Township Board meeting, Shane McCartney approached Diane Glidden — wife of a city council member with whom the McCartneys had an established hostile relationship — and said, 'You fu--ing bi-ch, you better sleep with one eye open.' (The Amended Complaint had characterized this as a 'conversational comment,' but the court declined to accept that characterization because it was contradicted by Shane's own guilty plea and by a state court order.) Ms. Glidden reported the statement to the Martin County Sheriff as a threat. The Martin County Attorney then prosecuted Shane under Minnesota Statute § 609.72, subdivision 1(3), which prohibits offensive, obscene, or abusive language tending reasonably to arouse alarm, anger, or resentment in others. Shane moved to dismiss the charges on First Amendment grounds in state court, arguing his words did not constitute 'fighting words.' The state court denied the motion, finding the evidence could support a jury finding that the statement rose to the level of fighting words in context. Shane then pleaded guilty and on September 10, 2024, was sentenced to a one-year stay of adjudication (a deferred outcome conditioned on completing unsupervised probation, after which the case would be dismissed).

The Federal Lawsuit Plaintiffs filed this federal action asserting, among other claims, that § 609.72, subdivision 1(3) is facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment (Count V) and unconstitutional as applied to them (Count VI). The basis for both claims was that plaintiffs wish to use phrases like 'sleep with one eye open' in one-on-one conversations in Martin County but have stopped doing so for fear of prosecution. The Amended Complaint acknowledged that Shane was 'jurisdictionally ineligible at the moment to bring the First Amendment claims' and framed the damages portion of Counts V and VI as running only to Victoria.

Motion to Dismiss Standard The County moved to dismiss under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) (failure to state a claim) and, alternatively, Rule 12(b)(1) (lack of subject matter jurisdiction). Under Rule 12(b)(6), a court accepts all well-pleaded facts as true but does not accept legal conclusions or facts contradicted by public records. A complaint must plead enough facts to make the claim plausible on its face.

Relevant Minnesota Law: S.L.J. and the Fighting Words Doctrine In 1978, the Minnesota Supreme Court in Matter of Welfare of S.L.J. held that § 609.72, subdivision 1(3) was facially overbroad and vague under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, but saved it from invalidation by narrowly construing it to apply only to 'fighting words' — words inherently likely to provoke violent reaction, that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace, or that have an immediate tendency to provoke retaliatory violence. The S.L.J. court also held that whether words are fighting words depends heavily on the specific circumstances of their utterance. In that case, a 14-year-old girl who shouted 'Fu-k you pigs' at police officers from 15–30 feet away was found not to have used fighting words because her words were not likely to incite an immediate breach of the peace or provoke violent reaction from ordinary, reasonable officers. The court in the present case analyzed the 1991 amendment to § 609.72 and found it made no substantive change to the speech-regulating portion of the statute, confirming that S.L.J. remains controlling.

Jurisdictional Arguments: Rooker-Feldman and Younger Abstention The County argued that two doctrines barred the court from hearing this case. The Rooker-Feldman doctrine holds that lower federal courts lack jurisdiction to review or effectively reverse state court judgments (except in habeas corpus — a separate form of post-conviction relief — proceedings). The Younger abstention doctrine directs federal courts to refrain from interfering with ongoing state criminal proceedings when those proceedings involve important state interests and offer an adequate opportunity to raise federal constitutional questions.

The court rejected both arguments. As to Younger, the court found that Shane's state case appeared to be over — his one-year stay of adjudication would have been ripe for dismissal as of September 10, 2025, and no new filings appeared in the state court record. Without an ongoing state proceeding, Younger does not apply. As to Rooker-Feldman, the court found that plaintiffs were not asking the federal court to review or overturn the state court judgment; they were raising independent, forward-looking claims about the constitutionality of future prosecutions. The court concluded there was no jurisdictional bar.

Standing Analysis — The Core Holding The court's dispositive analysis concerned Article III standing (the constitutional requirement that a plaintiff have a real stake in the outcome of the lawsuit). To establish standing for a pre-enforcement First Amendment challenge, a plaintiff must show: (1) an injury in fact; (2) a causal connection between the injury and the challenged conduct; and (3) that a favorable ruling would likely redress the injury. When the claimed injury is a 'chilling effect' — the plaintiff self-censors speech because of fear of prosecution — the First Amendment allows somewhat more lenient standing requirements than in other cases. However, the threat of prosecution must still be credible and the self-censorship must be objectively reasonable.

The court held that plaintiffs lacked standing for three independent reasons:

First, because § 609.72 subdivision 1(3) is narrowly construed to cover only fighting words (per S.L.J.), plaintiffs have no credible or objectively reasonable basis to fear prosecution for using ordinary phrases like 'sleep with one eye open' or 'watch your back' in one-on-one conversations. They are free to use such phrases as long as they do so in a context that does not amount to a fighting-words situation. Plaintiffs' briefing and complaint ignored the context-dependency of the fighting-words doctrine established in S.L.J.

Second, the only instance of enforcement cited by plaintiffs — Shane's prosecution — does not support a credible threat against Victoria. Shane was not prosecuted merely for saying 'sleep with one eye open'; he was prosecuted for combining a profane personal insult ('fu--ing bi-ch') with a threatening statement directed at a specific person with whom he had a documented hostile relationship, in a public setting. That factual context made the statement fighting words. The court found no credible risk of prosecution for merely using pedestrian phrases in ordinary conversation. Victoria also failed to allege any factual context for her own desired use of the phrases that would explain why she reasonably fears prosecution.

Third, the case is distinguishable from Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus, 573 U.S. 149 (2014), in which the Supreme Court found standing for a pre-enforcement challenge. In SBA, the challenged statute was broad and had recently been enforced against the very same conduct the plaintiff wished to engage in. Here, § 609.72 subdivision 1(3) is narrowly limited to fighting words, and the only enforcement cited involved fighting words, not the protected speech plaintiffs claim to want to use. The court also noted that plaintiffs' argument about third parties who might chill their speech at political protests appeared only in counsel's brief, not in the Amended Complaint itself, and did not establish that those third parties would be affected differently from Victoria.

Ruling The court granted the County's motion to dismiss. Counts V and VI of the Amended Complaint are dismissed with prejudice (meaning they cannot be refiled). The court's order specifies that judgment shall be entered accordingly. The remaining claims (Counts I, II, III, IV, and VII) against the other defendants — the City of Welcome and the Welcome Historical Society — are not addressed in this opinion and presumably remain pending.