The court of appeals reversed a district court judgment. The court held that the United States’ display of a forty-three foot Latin cross at a war memorial violated the establishment clause.
Steve Trunk, Jewish War Veterans of the United States, Inc. and others sued the City of San Diego, the federal government, and the U.S. Secretary of Defense, seeking to enjoin the display of a giant Latin cross on public lands. The forty-three foot cross had stood, in one form or another, atop Mount Soledad in San Diego for almost a hundred years. In the late 1990s, the site was dedicated as a war memorial. The federal government took possession of the memorial from the City of San Diego in 2006. In their lawsuit, initiated almost immediately after the government took possession of the memorial, Trunk and the veterans argued, among other things, that display of the cross violated the Establishment Clause.
