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Heffernan v. City of Paterson,
No. 14-1280, 578 U.S. ___ (2016), was a United States Supreme Court case in 2016 concerning the First Amendment rights of public employees. By a 6–2 margin, the Court held that a public employee's constitutional rights might be violated when an employer, believing that the employee was engaging in what would be protected speech, disciplines them because of that belief, even if the employee did not exercise such a constitutional right.
The case was brought after Jeffrey Heffernan, a detective with the Paterson, New Jersey police force, went to a distribution center and picked up a lawn sign for the candidate challenging the city's incumbent mayor in the 2005 election (Heffernan's mother had wanted a sign, so he was getting one for her). While Heffernan did not support the challenger, after other officers saw him with the sign they told senior officers, including the police chief, who strongly supported the mayor. For his apparent public support of the other candidate, they demoted Heffernan to beat patrol work as a uniformed officer.
Heffernan brought suit alleging that his demotion violated his First Amendment rights. The case took a decade to reach the Supreme Court. For most of that time it was in federal district court, where it was heard by three different judges. A jury verdict in Heffernan's favor was set aside. A later summary judgment in the city's favor was overturned on appeal before being granted again in the third trial.[1]
Writing for a majority of the Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Breyer stated that the department's belief was all that mattered, since the Court's precedent in this area holds it is unconstitutional for a government agency to discipline an employee (who does not work under a contract that explicitly permits such discipline) for engaging in partisan political activity, as long as that activity is not disruptive to the agency's operations. Even if Heffernan was not engaging in protected speech, he wrote, the discipline against him sent a message to others to avoid exercising their rights. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a dissenting opinion in which he was joined by Justice Samuel Alito, in which he agreed that Heffernan had been harmed, but his constitutional rights had not been violated.
Contents [hide]
1 Legal background
2 Prior history
2.1 Original dispute
2.2 District court
2.3 Court of Appeals
2.4 Supreme Court
2.4.1 Oral arguments
3 Opinion of the Court
3.1 Dissent
4 Commentary
5 Aftermath
6 See also
7 References
Legal background[edit]
The First Amendment guarantees the rights of freedom of speech and peaceable assembly, among others. While not explicitly mentioned, the Supreme Court has held that the right to assembly includes the freedom of association, particularly political association.[2] These protections not only prohibit the government from passing laws which infringe upon these rights, but also from taking actions which would violate them. While the Bill of Rights—which includes the First Amendment—applied originally only to the federal government, the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment allowed for the application of the Bill of Rights to the states under the incorporation doctrine.[3]
In order to better protect these rights in the Reconstruction Era, Congress passed the Second Enforcement Act of 1871 at the request of President Ulysses S. Grant to better counter white supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan that were intimidating and suppressing voting by black citizens.[4] The act provided a remedy for those citizens who were deprived of their constitutional rights under the "color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia" and is currently codified at 42 U.S.C. § 1983.[5] With its decision in Monroe v. Pape (1961), the Court expanded the reach of section 1983 such that it is now used as a method of checking abuse by state officials who infringe upon constitutionally protected rights.[6][7]
The First Amendment protects public employees from retaliation by their employer when speaking on matters of public concern.[8] In Pickering v. Board of Education (1968), the Court first articulated the right of public employees to be protected from dismissal for exercising their right to free speech. There, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a teacher who was fired after writing a letter to a local newspaper critical of its handling of a recent bond issue.[9] Eight years later, this protection from dismissal was extended to cover partisan political ideology and affiliation in Elrod v. Burns.[8]
But the Court has recognized that the "government as employer" has wider constitutional latitude in its decisions than the "government as sovereign".[10] In order to adequately delineate the limits of the government-as-employer's discretion, the Court developed a framework in Connick v. Myers (1983) known as the Connick test. It consists of elements. The first is the threshold a plaintiff must pass to state a claim: the plaintiff must show that they were speaking on a matter of public concern. The second falls to the employer: they must show that the harm to workplace efficiency outweighs the harm caused by infringing upon the right to free speech.[11]
In Waters v. Churchill (1994), the Court was faced with two differing accounts of the speech at issue. The question presented to the Court was whether the Connick test ought be applied to what the employer thought was said or what was actually said. The case revolved around a nurse dismissed for a conversation she had with a coworker. There was a discrepancy between what she argued was said and what her employer thought was said. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, joined by a plurality of justices, opined that the Connick test must be applied to the speech the employer thought occurred, and on which it acted, rather than that which the finder of fact determines did occur.[12]
Prior history[edit]
Original dispute[edit]
A cityscape of medium-height high-rises and some older buildings amid trees, seen from above through some leaves and branches
Downtown Paterson
In 2005, Jeffrey Heffernan was a detective with the Paterson, New Jersey police. His supervisor and the chief of police were both appointed by the city's incumbent mayor, Jose Torres, who was being challenged by city councilman Lawrence Spagnola in that year's election. Heffernan was friendly with Spagnola, a former police chief,[1] and informally supported his campaign. He could not vote in the election as he did not live in the city.[13] At the request of his sick mother, who did live in the city, Heffernan while off-duty picked up a Spagnola lawn sign for her after her previous sign was stolen. Other officers saw him at the distribution location holding a sign and talking to Spagnola campaign staff. They soon notified superiors, and the next day officials demoted Heffernan from detective to patrol officer for his perceived "overt involvement" with the Spagnola campaign.[14]
District court[edit]
Heffernan sued the city, the mayor, and his superior officers under 42 U.S.C. §1983 in the federal District Court for New Jersey, claiming that his rights of freedom of speech as well as freedom of association had been violated.[15] Heffernan contended that while he had not actually engaged in any protected speech, the department acted on the belief that he had, and the department should not have demoted him on the basis of that erroneous belief.[14]
In 2009, a jury found for Heffernan and awarded him damages from the police officials and the city. Despite the verdict, Heffernan sought a retrial because Judge Peter G. Sheridan had not allowed him to pursue the freedom of speech claim; the defense did so as well because Judge Sheridan had allowed the freedom of association claim. While considering these motions, Judge Sheridan became aware of a conflict of interest through a former law firm and set aside the verdict, setting a new date for trial before Judge Dennis M. Cavanaugh.[16]
Judge Cavanaugh granted summary judgment to the defendants on the freedom of speech claim based on their earlier motions, holding that Heffernan had not engaged in protected speech so his rights could not have been violated. In 2012, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Judge Cavanaugh's ruling and remanded the case to him with instructions that he was to allow Heffernan to present his freedom of association claim and consider the facts from the jury trial when reconsidering the summary-judgment motions.[16]
Judge Kevin McNulty heard the case on remand. After considering the parties' motions for summary judgment again, he ruled in the city's favor in 2014. Heffernan, he ruled, had not engaged in any protected speech or expressive conduct. Judge McNulty also ruled that Heffernan could not prevail on claims that his perceived speech was protected, per Ambrose v. Robinson Township, a previous case on that issue in the Third Circuit,[17] or that his actions were protected since they aided and abetted speech.[18] Judge McNulty also rejected similar claims for freedom of association. He decided that Dye v. Office of the Racing Commission, a case in which the Sixth Circuit had held that the First Amendment reached perceived political association,[19] was not a precedent he could rely on since Dye itself explicitly rejected Ambrose, and as a district judge he could not reject circuit precedent.[20]
Court of Appeals[edit]
On appeal to the Third Circuit, a three-judge panel of Judge Robert Cowen, Judge Morton Ira Greenberg and Judge Thomas I. Vanaskie unanimously held for the city.[1] In a decision issued in 2015, Judge Vanaskie, writing for the Court, reiterated Judge McNulty's finding that Heffernan's actions in picking up the sign for his mother did not constitute protected speech or association. He distinguished the case at hand from the Sixth Circuit's ruling in Dye by noting that in that case, the employers had inferred the employees' intent from their non-participation in partisan politics rather than an actual action they had taken, as had occurred in Heffernan's case.[1]
Judge Vanaskie instead found guidance from the Supreme Court's 1994 holding in Waters v. Churchill, in which it had upheld an Illinois public hospital's dismissal of a nurse for her comments about a supervisor to a colleague, despite an ongoing factual dispute about the substance of those comments. The Court found that the hospital administration had made a reasonable attempt to investigate what the nurse had said before firing her. In that case, the Court had said explicitly that disciplining employees for things they did not actually do did not rise to the level of a constitutional violation.[1]
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