Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca8-03-02972/USCOURTS-ca8-03-02972-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 440
Nature of Suit: Other Civil Rights
Cause of Action: 

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United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT

___________

No. 03-2972

___________

Randall R. Bradford, *

*

Plaintiff - Appellee, *

*

v. * Appeal from the United States

* District Court for the

Mike Huckabee, Individually * Eastern District of Arkansas.

and as Governor of the State *

of Arkansas, et al., *

*

Defendants - Appellants. *

___________

Submitted: September 17, 2004

Filed: January 10, 2005

___________

Before LOKEN, Chief Judge, BEAM and BYE, Circuit Judges.

___________

LOKEN, Chief Judge.

Randall Bradford resigned from his policy-making position as Executive Chief

Information Officer (“ECIO”) of the State of Arkansas. Bradford’s letter to Governor

Mike Huckabee stated that the resignation would be effective two weeks later, as

Bradford intended to criticize the Governor’s administration to the press and to the

legislature while still serving as ECIO. Not surprisingly, Governor Huckabee instead

made the resignation effective immediately. Bradford then commenced this action

against Huckabee, three members of the Governor’s staff, and the Director of the

Arkansas Department of Information Systems. The complaint asserts numerous

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claims for injunctive, declaratory, and damage relief under state and federal law,

including § 1983 damage claims alleging that Bradford was constructively discharged

in violation of his First Amendment free speech rights as a public employee.

Defendants appeal the district court’s denial of their motion to dismiss these § 1983

claims on qualified immunity grounds. Concluding that Bradford has failed to state

§ 1983 claims under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, we reverse.

I. Background

Created by statute in 2001, the ECIO is appointed by and serves at the will of

the Governor, Ark. Code § 25-33-103(a), and has broad responsibilities, including to

formulate and promulgate “policies . . . for information technology in the state,” to

develop “legislation and rules and regulations affecting electronic records

management,” to develop “information technology security policy for state agencies,”

and to “[a]dvise state agencies in acquiring information technology service.” Ark.

Code Ann. § 25-33-104(a). Bradford was appointed by Governor Huckabee in

October 2001. He was the first person to hold the ECIO position. 

As relevant here, Bradford’s 54-page complaint alleges that he was “retaliated

against for attempting to communicat[e] with or report to State Legislators having

oversight,” and was “stripped of his authority and reprimanded” for attempting to

comply with his statutory duty “to interface with and report to the legislature and

provide them with legislative oversight.” Consequently, Bradford alleges, he

“resigned as a result of being constructively discharged.” The complaint supports

these allegations by attaching a number of e-mail messages between Bradford and the

Governor’s staff between January and April 2002. In these messages, staff criticized

Bradford for “cozying up to the legislators” he had invited to a committee meeting,

and warned Bradford to “be careful about involving the [legislature] in your

meetings” because “[i]nviting them into the process blurs the lines of responsibility

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The Oversight Committee has 12 members appointed by the Governor from

the private sector and state and local government to “advise the [ECIO] on the

allocation of information technology resources in the state.” Ark. Code § 25-33-106.

The Joint Committee is a standing committee of the General Assembly with oversight

responsibilities on information technology issues. Ark. Code §§ 10-3-1703, -1704.

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in state government.” The complaint also includes Exhibit Q, a copy of Bradford’s

June 13, 2002 resignation letter, in which he stated: 

Unfortunately, I have concluded that I must resign . . . for professional

reasons. I do not believe that the current working environment within

your staff is conducive to effective management. . . . In order to be

effective, I would need to be allowed to work in a collaborative

environment, with a spirit of cooperation, with my Information

Technology Oversight Committee and the Joint Committee for

Advanced Communications and Information Technology.1

 Those

relationships have been strained by your staff’s attempts to restrict

communication to the point that my office cannot be as effective as it

should be. . . . I am giving two weeks’ notice effective today . . . .

Upon receiving the letter, Governor Huckabee sent Bradford a notice terminating his

employment “effective 12:00 noon today, June 13, 2002.” The complaint alleges that

Bradford “intended to make a statement to the press and to the legislature [after

tendering his resignation]. As a result of his intended speech, Mr. Bradford was

terminated two weeks early.”

Defendants moved to dismiss portions of the complaint under Rule 12(b)(6) of

the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. In an initial order, the district court recited that

defendants contended they are entitled to qualified immunity from Bradford’s § 1983

damage claims, but the court denied the motion to dismiss those claims without

discussing the qualified immunity issue. Defendants appealed the interlocutory order,

and we remanded because we lacked jurisdiction absent a qualified immunity

determination. Bradford v. Huckabee, 330 F.3d 1038 (8th Cir. 2003). On remand,

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the district court held that the defendants are not entitled to immunity because

“Bradford’s right to speak about matters of public administration over which he had

supervision certainly outweigh[s] any interest defendants could assert in keeping the

information from the legislature and the public.” We review de novo the denial of a

motion to dismiss on the basis of qualified immunity. To prevail at this stage of the

proceedings, defendants must show that they are entitled to qualified immunity on the

face of the complaint. Hafley v. Lohman, 90 F.3d 264, 266 (8th Cir. 1996), cert.

denied, 519 U.S. 1149 (1997). The exhibits Bradford attached to his complaint are

part of the complaint for this purpose. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 10(c); Meehan v. United

Consumers Club Franchising Corp., 312 F.3d 909, 913 (8th Cir. 2002).

II. Discussion

Qualified immunity protects public officials from § 1983 damage actions if

“their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights

of which a reasonable person would have known.” Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S.

800, 818 (1982). “[T]he better approach to resolving cases in which the defense of

qualified immunity is raised is to determine first whether the plaintiff has alleged a

deprivation of a constitutional right at all.” County of Sacramento v. Lewis, 523 U.S.

833, 841 n.5 (1998); see Domina v. Van Pelt, 235 F.3d 1091, 1096 (8th Cir. 2000).

It is now well established that “[a] State may not condition public employment

on an employee’s exercise of his or her First Amendment rights.” O’Hare Truck

Serv., Inc. v. City of Northlake, 518 U.S. 712, 717 (1996). But public employees do

not have an unlimited First Amendment right to say what they please, even on issues

of great public importance. For example,“the Governor of a State may appropriately

believe that the official duties of various assistants who help him write speeches,

explain his views to the press, or communicate with the legislature cannot be

performed effectively unless those persons share his political beliefs and party

commitments.” Branti v. Finkel, 445 U.S. 507, 518 (1980). As we said in Johnson

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v. City of West Memphis, 113 F.3d 842, 844 (8th Cir. 1997), personal loyalty is “an

appropriate requirement” if a public official “reports directly to the [governor] and

his duties include public relations and responsibility for . . . long-range planning.” 

Viewed from this perspective, we fail to discern any First Amendment content

to Bradford’s constructive discharge claim. The e-mail messages and Bradford’s

resignation letter reveal a not-uncommon executive branch power struggle between

an agency head who wanted to include key legislators in the agency’s day-to-day

affairs, and a governor’s office that insisted upon a more arms-length relationship

between the two branches of government. When Bradford did not get his way, he

declared his work environment intolerable and quit. To label his resignation a

constructive discharge seems a serious distortion of that term, as it has come to be

used in federal employment discrimination law. But even if the resignation could be

deemed a constructive discharge, Bradford resigned because of a policy dispute, not

because he had been punished for exercising or attempting to exercise his public

employee’s First Amendment right “as a citizen, in commenting upon matters of

public concern.” Pickering v. Board of Education, 391 U.S. 563, 568 (1968). As the

Supreme Court reminded us in Connick v. Myers, 461 U.S. 138, 143 (1983):

The repeated emphasis in Pickering on the right of a public employee

“as a citizen . . .” was not accidental. This language, reiterated in all of

Pickering’s progeny, reflects . . . the common-sense realization that

government offices could not function if every employment decision

became a constitutional matter.

This leaves Bradford’s claim that his First Amendment rights were violated

when he was terminated two weeks early because he “intended to make a statement

to the press and to the legislature” after tendering his resignation. In other words,

Bradford claims a constitutional right to retain his position as a policy-making agency

head while he publicly criticized the Governor after resigning. There is no such

constitutional right, at least not in the First Amendment to the United States

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Constitution. “[T]hough a private person is perfectly free to uninhibitedly and

robustly criticize a state governor’s legislative program, we have never suggested that

the Constitution bars the governor from firing a high-ranking deputy for doing the

same thing.” Waters v. Churchill, 511 U.S. 661, 672 (1994) (plurality opinion); see

Rose v. Stephens, 291 F.3d 917, 922-23 (6th Cir. 2002); Lewis v. Cohen, 165 F.3d

154, 168-69 (2d Cir. 1999) (Weinstein, J., concurring), and cases cited. 

For these reasons, we conclude that Bradford’s complaint fails to state a First

Amendment § 1983 claim against any defendant. Accordingly, defendants are

entitled to qualified immunity, and the district court erred in denying their motion to

dismiss these claims. See Siegert v. Gilley, 500 U.S. 226 (1991). The court also

erred in not dismissing the § 1983 claims against the defendants acting in their

official capacities. The court’s order dated July 8, 2003, is reversed, and the case is

remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.

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