At issue was whether current and former federal officials, including FBI Director Robert Mueller and former United States Attorney General John Ashcroft, were entitled to qualified immunity against an allegation that they knew of or condoned racial and religious discrimination against individuals detained after the September 11 attacks.
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The Court decided that given that the September 11 attacks were perpetrated by Arab Muslims, it was not surprising that a legitimate policy directing law enforcement to arrest and detain individuals because of their suspected link to the attacks would produce a disparate, incidental impact on Arab Muslims, even though the policy's purpose was to target neither Arabs nor Muslims.
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The plaintiff, Abudullah al-Kidd (born Lavoni T. Kidd in Wichita, Kansas), is an American citizen and was a prominent football player at the University of Idaho.
The Supreme Court of the United States decided the case, which began in 1999, and found that, contra the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, "the Child Online Protection Act COPA's reliance on community standards to identify 'material that is harmful to minors' does not by itself render the statute substantially overbroad for purposes of the First Amendment" (majority opinion).
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COPA was Congress's second attempt to criminalize the Internet distribution of what it considered pornography, including simulated pornography and artwork.
In Ashcroft v. al-Kidd (2011), the detainee was never charged or called as a witness, and sued the U.S. Attorney General in office at the time he was held.
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In 2009 the Ninth Circuit of Appeals in San Francisco found in Ashcroft v. al-Kidd that former Attorney General John Ashcroft could be sued personally for wrongful detention by Abdullah al-Kidd.
Just before the case was brought to trial in 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition) that the statute prohibiting adults from portraying children in films and books was unconstitutional.