TRI In The News
Veteran Files Lawsuit Over Confinement
A Marine Corps veteran is arguing in federal court that basic constitutional guarantees were violated when Chesterfield County police, federal agents and mental health workers combined to have him involuntarily committed last summer.
Brandon J. Raub, now 27, argues in a 14-page complaint filed Wednesday by lawyers working with the Charlottesville-based Rutherford Institute that his “baseless incarceration” violated his right to free speech, right to due process, and freedom from illegal searches and seizure.
Raub apparently drew the attention of federal agents through various Facebook postings in which he criticized the government, lost freedoms, the Federal Reserve and the nature of the United States’ military presence overseas.
“There is evil going on all around the world. The United States was meant to lead the charge against injustice, but through our example not our force. People do not respond to having liberty and freedom forced on them,” he wrote in part of one rambling assessment of the country.
Defendants in the complaint include Chesterfield police officers who took Raub into custody Aug. 16, unnamed federal agents, and Chesterfield mental health workers who assessed Raub’s mental state and, according to the complaint, wrongfully concluded he was a danger.
“Brandon would still be in a mental hospital somewhere if we hadn’t intervened; I’m convinced of that,” said John W. Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, in an interview Wednesday. The Rutherford Institute challenged Raub’s detention and won a reversal in Hopewell Circuit Court last summer.
Raub was freed from a Salem mental hospital Aug. 24, after Circuit Court Judge William Sharrett ruled that the involuntary petition ordering Raub detained was “so devoid of any factual allegations that it could not be reasonably expected to give rise to a case or controversy.”
The complaint filed Wednesday alleges that mental health workers and police illegally undertook “to silence the political speech of Raub and to chill the speech of others that is critical of the government,” depriving Raub of his constitutional rights. Raub’s plight was followed across the country.
“Brandon Raub’s case exposed the seedy underbelly of a governmental system that is targeting military veterans for expressing their discontent over America’s rapid transition to a police state,” Whitehead said in a press release.
“Brandon Raub is not the first veteran to be targeted for speaking out against the government. Hopefully, by holding officials accountable, we can ensure that Brandon is the last to suffer in this way,” Whitehead said.
A Chesterfield spokesman said the county has not seen the complaint and does not comment on pending litigation.
Filed by attorneys with the Richmond law firms of Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott and of Troutman Sanders, the complaint asks for unspecified compensatory and punitive damages and an injunction blocking any retribution against Raub for exercising his constitutional rights.
The complaint attacks what are described as baseless conclusions about Raub’s mental state — that he was psychotic and a danger to himself — despite no more substantive observations than Raub “had long pauses before answering questions.”
After Raub’s release, Whitehead staged a long interview with the Chesterfield resident in which Raub spoke eloquently about his views of the country and about his experience.
The detention, the complaint alleges, “was a pretext designed to silence Raub’s speech critical of the government by subjecting him to involuntary commitment.” The complaint asserts that the actions against Raub were part of a Department of Homeland Security program surveilling veterans with extremist views.
The government, the complaint alleges, declared Raub mentally ill and detained him to suppress free speech and “to defame and discredit him and his beliefs.”
