Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca10-88-01317/USCOURTS-ca10-88-01317-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Ben K. Blake
Appellant
City of Aurora
Not Party
Lieutenant Jeffrey McEvoy
Appellee
Harold J. Shoemaker
Appellant

Document Text:

PUBLISH 

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS 

TENTH CIRCUIT 

LIEUTENANT JEFFREY McEVOY, 

Plaintiff-Appellee, 

vs. 

1 . FILED 

Lrnt~ Srates Courr of Appeals 

Tench Ci:-ad: 

AUG 11 1989 

ROBERT L. HOECKER 

Clerk 

HAROLD J. SHOEMAKER and 

BEN K. BLAKE, 

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No. 88-1317 

Defendants-Appellants, 

& 

CITY OF AURORA, COLORADO, 

Defendant. 

APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT 

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLORADO 

(D.C. No. 86-Z-1163) 

Sander N. Karp (Shelley P. Dodge with him on the brief) of Karp & 

Dodge, Denver, Colorado~ for Plaintiff-Appellee. 

Herbert C. Phillips of Hayes & Phillips, Denver, Colorado, for 

Defendants-Appellants. 

Before LOGAN, MOORE and BALDOCK, Circuit Judges. 

BALDOCK, Circuit Judge. 

Appellate Case: 88-1317 Document: 01019836018 Date Filed: 08/11/1989 Page: 1 
Things have changed since Justice Holmes, then a member of 

the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, declared nearly a 

century ago that a policeman "may have a constitutional right to 

talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a 

policeman." McAuliffe v. Mayor of New Bedford, 29 N.E. 517, 517 

(Mass. 1892). At least since the Supreme Court's decision in 

Shelton v. Tucker, 364 U.S. 479 (1960), the precept that 

government officials cannot alter the employment status of a 

public employee for exercising first amendment guarantees has been 

a part of our constitutional jurisprudence. In this case, 

adherence to this precept is in controversy. 

I • 

Plaintiff-appellee Jeffrey McEvoy, a recently retired 

lieutenant of the City of Aurora Police Department, instituted 

this civil rights action in the district court pursuant to 42 

U.S.C. §§ 1983 & 1985, claiming that the city and its acting and 

former chiefs of police, defendants-appellants Harold Shoemaker 

and Ben Blake respectively, improperly denied him a promotion to 

the rank of captain as a result of a letter he wrote to the city 

council two years earlier complaining of the "mismanagement of 

command level personnel" in the department. Shoemaker and Blake 

moved for summary judgment under Fed. R. Civ. P. 56 asserting 

qualified immunity on the basis that McEvoy's letter was not 

protected speech within the meaning of the first amendment, or in 

the alternative, that the protected status of the letter was not 

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Appellate Case: 88-1317 Document: 01019836018 Date Filed: 08/11/1989 Page: 2 
clearly established at the time of the alleged wrongdoing. The 

district court denied the motion, and the officers appealed. 

The denial of a qualified immunity claim is reviewable de 

nova as a final decision under 28 U.S.C. § 1291. Mitchell v. 

Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511, 530 (1985); Valdez v. City and County of 

Denver, No. 86-2719, slip op. at 3-4 (10th Cir. July 6, 1989). 

Our analysis is twofold. See Brawner v. City of Richardson, 855 

F.2d 187, 191 (5th Cir. 1988); Noyola v. Texas Dept. of Human 

Res., 846 F.2d 1021, 1023 (5th Cir. 1988). First, we must ask 

whether McEvoy's letter was entitled to first amendment 

protection. Pickering v. Board of Educ., 391 U.S. 563, 568 

(1968). If so entitled, we next ask whether McEvoy's first 

amendm~nt right was "clearly established" such that reasonable 

officers could have believed their failure to promote McEvoy was 

unlawful. Anderson v .. Cceighton, 483 U.S. 635; 641 (1987); 

Pleasant v. Lovell, 876 F.2d 787, 794 (10th Cir. 1989). Because 

we hold that McEvoy's letter was not entitled to first amendment 

protection, our inquiry there ends. We need not reach the second 

inquiry. Given our holding, Shoemaker and Blake could not have 

violated any clearly established constitutional right of McEvoy. 

II. 

In Mount Healthy City School Dist. v. Doyle, 429 U.S. 274, 

287 (1977), the Supreme Court established a three prong test to 

determine whether a governmental entity's adverse employment 

decision concerning an employee contravened that employee's first 

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Appellate Case: 88-1317 Document: 01019836018 Date Filed: 08/11/1989 Page: 3 
amendment guarantees. The employee must initially show as a 

matter of law that the speech at issue deserves constitutional 

protection. This question involves two steps, only the first of 

which we are concerned with in this instance: (1) whether the 

speech constitutes a matter of public concern, and (2) whether the 

employee's interest in making such statements outweighs "the 

interest of the State, as an employer, in promoting the efficiency 

of the public services. it performs through its employees." 

Pickering, 391 U.S. at 568. If the court deems the speech worthy 

of protection, the employee then must prove as a factual matter 

that the protected speech was a "motivating factor" in the 

detrimental employment decision. Mount Healthy, 429 U.S. 274. 

· Lastly, if the employee establishes his case, the employer must be 

given an opportunity to persuade the jury that it would have 

reached the same ~ecision in the absence of the protected 

activity. Id. See generally Melton v. City of Oklahoma City, No. 

85-1738 slip op. at 3-4 (10th Cir. June 29, 1989)(Baldock, J., 

concurring in part and dissenting in part). 

Whether McEvoy's letter addressed a matter of public concern 

depends on its content, context and form as revealed by the entire 

record. Ranking v. McPherson, 483 U.S. 378, 384-85 (1987). To 

constitute a matter of public concern, speech must relate to a 

topic of political, social or other concern to the community. 

Wulf v. City of Wichita, Nos. 87-1725, 87-1735, 87-1750 & 87-2563, 

slip op. at 27 (10th Cir. Aug. 9, 1989). But speech which may be 

of general interest to the public is not automatically afforded 

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Appellate Case: 88-1317 Document: 01019836018 Date Filed: 08/11/1989 Page: 4 
first amendment protection. Wilson v. City of Littleton, 732 F.2d 

765, 769 (10th Cir. 1981)• In Koch v. City of Hutchinson, 847 

F.2d 1436, 1440 n.11 (10th Cir.)(en bane), cert. denied, 109 S. 

Ct. 262 (1988), we recently recognized that in analyzing such 

issues, "courts have particularly focused on the extent to which 

the content of the employee speech was calculated to disclose 

wrongdoing or inefficiency or other malfeasance on the part of 

government officials in the conduct of their official duties .. '' 

More recently, in Conaway v. Smith, 853 F.2d 789, 796 (10th Cir. 

1988), we emphasized that in analyzing whether speech constitutes 

a matter of pub1ic concern, the focus is on the motive of the 

speaker, "i.e., whether the speech was calculated to disclose 

misconduct or dealt with only personal disputes and grievances 

with no relevance to the public interests." (emphasis in 

original). See also Callaway v. Hafeman, 832 F.2d 414,. 417 (7th 

Cir. 1987) (courts must look at the point of the speech: Was the 

employee's point to bring wrongdoing to light or to raise other 

issues of public concern because they are of public concern, or 

was the point to further some purely priyate interest?). 

III. 

The record in this case reveals that McEvoy sent a nine page, 

single spaced, typewritten letter to the city council complaining 

generally that "internal politicing [sic], favoritism and clique 

deprivations'' governed "transfer[s], training utilization, and 

personnel relationships" within the police department. Although 

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Appellate Case: 88-1317 Document: 01019836018 Date Filed: 08/11/1989 Page: 5 
prefacing his specific grievances with the statements that his 

"expressions ar~ commonly held viewpoints" and that he was 

"speaking for others," McEvoy proceeded to complain of the 

department's failure to select him for training school or promote 

him from his position as relief watch commander despite his 

qualifications. McEvoy, however, was "not alleging misconduct--

only mismanagement and inequities" (emphasis added) and concluded 

by stating that he would "not display to nor discuss this report 

with personnel." 

Given the entirety of McEvoy's letter, we are convinced that 

his principal purpose in writing it was not to disclose 

"malfeasance on the part of government officials in the conduct of 

their official duties," Koch,· 847 F.2d at 1445, but instead to air 

his frustration at having failed to receive a promotion. The 

Sixth Circuit recently explained our dilemma: 

[I]t is hard to see how any aspect of the operation of 

any department of any public body could be said not to 

constitute a legitimate subject of public concern. 

Connick instructs us to examine both the content and the 

context of the employee's statement, however, and the 

Court's opinion seems to suggest that if, having done 

so, we find that the employee's personal interest qua 

employee predominates over any interest he might have as 

a member of the general public, we are not to intercede. 

Brown v. City of Trenton, 867 F.2d 318, 321-22 (6th Cir. 1989). 

In Connick v. Myers, 461 U.S. 138 (1983), the Supreme Court 

considered the protection to be afforded questions contained in an 

assistant prosecutor's intra-office survey concerning her coworkers' confidence and trust in various supervisors, the level of 

office morale, and the need. for a grievance committee. The Court 

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Appellate Case: 88-1317 Document: 01019836018 Date Filed: 08/11/1989 Page: 6 
viewed these inquiries as nothing more than "mere extensions of 

Myers' dispute over her transfer to another section of criminal 

court," id. at 148, and accordingly denied them protection and 

upheld the assistant prosecutor's termination: 

To presume that all matters which transpire within a 

government office are of public concern would mean that 

virtually every remark--and certainly every criticism 

directed at a public official--would plant the seed of a 

constitutional case. While as a matter of good 

judgment, public officials should be receptive to 

constructive criticism offered by their employees, the 

First Amendment does not require a public office to be 

run as a roundtable for employee complaints over 

internal office affairs. 

Id. at 149. Similarly, we conclude that McEvoy's letter served 

only to express his disappointment over internal office affairs. 

This case is unlike our recent decision in Wulf, Nos. 87-

1725, 87-1735, 87-1750 & 87-2563. Wulf, as a member of the Kansas 

Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), delivered a letter to the state 

attorney general seeking an investigation of the Wichita police 

chief's "alleged interference with the right of supervisory police 

officers to join the FOP; unfair treatment of the FOP private club 

vis-a-vis other private clubs; misappropriation and misuse of 

public funds; and [acquiescence in] sexual harassment of one 

officer by a supervisor." Id. slip op. at 28. Thereafter, Wulf 

was relieved of his duties as a Wichita city police officer. We 

concluded that Wulf's formal letter to the attorney general 

seeking an investigation of a public official's alleged misconduct 

strongly supported a finding of public concern. Id. slip op. at 

28-35. Such is not the case here. McEvoy's grievance pertained 

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Appellate Case: 88-1317 Document: 01019836018 Date Filed: 08/11/1989 Page: 7 
solely to what he perceived as the unfairness of his superiors' 

promotional decisions. 1 

Accordingly, the judgment of the district court denying 

defendants-appellants qualified immunity is REVERSED and this 

cause is REMANDED with instructions to enter judgment consistent 

with the views expressed herein. 

1 Likewise, the Fifth Circuit's decision in Brawner, 855 F.2d at 

187, that an attorney's letter written on behalf of a police 

officer constituted a matter of public concern is inapposite. 

Unlike the facts in that case, McEvoy did not allege serious 

police misconduct, did not send the letter to the local newspaper 

and did not comment upon matters previously originating in a 

public forum. Id. at 191. 

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