The Supreme Court on June 20 ruled in favor of a former city council member in Texas who sued for retaliation after she was arrested following her criticism of city officials.
Justice Clarence Thomas filed a dissenting opinion.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit failed to properly apply existing precedent, the Supreme Court held as it vacated the lower court’s judgment and returned the case to that court “for proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
The ruling allows former Castle Hills, Texas, council member Sylvia Gonzalez to revive her lawsuit and returns the case to a lower court. Ms. Gonzalez was charged under a rarely invoked Texas law that forbids destroying or tampering with government documents.
The case deals with qualified immunity, a rule created by the courts that shields government officials from individual liability unless the wrongdoer violated an established right.
Civil libertarians have become increasingly critical of the qualified immunity legal doctrine in recent years, which they say allows government officials to get away with sometimes egregious wrongdoing.
City officials, on the other hand, previously said that if the appeal were to succeed, qualified immunity could be jeopardized as a judicial policy.
The case dates to 2019, when Ms. Gonzalez won an election and became a councilwoman in Castle Hills.
She spearheaded a nonbinding petition among citizens demanding that the city manager be ousted for several reasons, among them that he failed to address residents’ concerns, such as fixing the streets.
According to the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm representing Ms. Gonzalez, city officials targeted her in a campaign of retaliation. The city argued that she wasn’t properly sworn in and replaced her on the city council with the candidate she defeated in the election.
Later, a judge reinstated Ms. Gonzalez.
A group of residents aligned with the mayor sued, claiming Ms. Gonzalez was incompetent. She prevailed in that lawsuit, too.
But officials “engineered Sylvia’s arrest for misplacing a document in her binder at a council meeting,” which “happened to be the same petition to remove the city manager that Sylvia had championed.”
“City officials argued Sylvia had stolen her own petition from the mayor as she was gathering her papers at the end of a council meeting,” the Institute for Justice stated.
Ms. Gonzalez spent a day behind bars and her mugshot appeared in local media reports.
Although the local district attorney soon withdrew the charges, Ms. Gonzalez assumed the effort to intimidate her would continue and resigned from the city council.
Ms. Gonzalez sued the city, its mayor, and its chief of police under 42 U.S. Code Section 1983, a federal law that allows individuals to sue the government for civil rights violations. The federal district court sided with her, denying qualified immunity to the officials.
U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra ruled in favor of Ms. Gonzalez. He wrote, “Instead of issuing a summons for the nonviolent misdemeanor, [the city] obtained a warrant to arrest the 72-year-old, which ensured that she would spend time in jail rather than remaining free and appearing before a judge.”
However, the Fifth Circuit reversed Judge Ezra’s decision. The appeals court found that Ms. Gonzalez couldn’t bring a First Amendment claim because the officials demonstrated probable cause sufficient to justify arresting her.
The circuit court invoked Nieves v. Bartlett, a 2019 Supreme Court ruling that held that when a plaintiff argues retaliatory arrest for constitutionally protected speech, that plaintiff must show that the authorities lacked probable cause to justify arrest. But the Court made an exception for cases in which the plaintiff could demonstrate that he or she was arrested while others who didn’t engage in protected speech hadn’t been.
The circuit court found in Ms. Gonzalez’s case that the evidence she presented was insufficient to qualify for the Nieves carve-out. That court found that she needed to produce examples of people who “mishandled a government petition but were not prosecuted under” the Texas law.
The Supreme Court’s per curiam opinion is an unusually brief five pages long.
The court cited Nieves, stating that as a general rule a plaintiff bringing a retaliatory arrest claim has to “prove the absence of probable cause for the arrest.”
Probable cause refers to the legal basis that permits police to arrest someone, carry out a search, or seize property. Probable cause for arrest is said to exist when the facts known to the police would lead a reasonable person to believe that a suspect has committed, is committing, or is in the process of trying to commit a criminal act.
The court stated that the existence of probable cause in itself doesn’t preclude a plaintiff’s claim if he presents “objective evidence that he was arrested when otherwise similarly situated individuals not engaged in the same sort of protected speech had not been.”
The Fifth Circuit took an “overly cramped” view of the exception the Supreme Court recognized in Nieves, the per curiam opinion stated.
In his dissenting opinion, Justice Thomas wrote that the retaliatory arrest claim should not be allowed to proceed.
No common law tort for retaliatory arrest existed when Section 1983 was enacted, so in Nieves, the court looked to the closest analogies, he wrote.
A tort is a wrongful act or an infringement of a right that leads to civil legal liability. The common law refers to law that comes from custom and judicial precedent rather than statutes.
But the court is making a mistake here because the “common-law torts most analogous to retaliatory-arrest claims are false imprisonment, malicious arrest, and malicious prosecution—all of which required a plaintiff to prove ‘the absence of probable cause.’”
Because Ms. Gonzalez has acknowledged that there was probable cause for the arrest, her claim shouldn’t proceed, Justice Thomas wrote.
After the Supreme Court ruled, Institute for Justice senior attorney Anya Bidwell hailed the decision.
“Retaliatory arrests undermine the very foundation of our democracy,” she said in a written statement.
Ms. Gonzalez was also pleased with the ruling.
“No one should have to go through what I went through, and with this decision, I’m confident it won’t happen again,” she said in a statement.
