Source: http://www.cuthbertsonlaw.com/civil_rights_blog?page=5
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 00:02:01+00:00

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Plaintiff brought a §1983 claim against the Town of Tusten and the Town’s Code Enforcement Officer alleging a violation of his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights after the Town sent a letter instructing him to remove the pro-fracking sign posted on his garage. Specifically, the plaintiff alleged that the defendants: (1) selectively enforced the Sign Ordinance against him in violation of the Equal Protection Clause, (2) enforced the Sign Ordinance in retaliation for exercising his First Amendment righs, and (3) discriminated against him on the basis of the viewpoint he expressed on fracking. The Town quickly made a motion to dismiss while the Code Enforcement Officer asserted qualified immunity, both of which were dismissed by the District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Examining the plaintiff’s claims, the Court found the plaintiff did have a constitutional right to advocate for a controversial viewpoint on political topics, as well as a right to publicly criticize Town officials. It then ruled that for purposes of a motion to dismiss, evidence that discrimination could have been a “motivating factor” was sufficient to defeat the motion. Paired with two citations for violating the Sign Ordinance as evidence of a “chilling effect” on speech, the Court held that the plaintiffs claim could proceed.
Finally, the Code Enforcement Officer was not entitled to qualified immunity because qualified immunity is conditioned upon objectively reasonable conduct, a standard which may or may not be met based upon whether retaliation was found to have played a substantial part in the Officer’s actions.
Our last post introduced the Monell claim and the requirements it provides for establishing municipal liability in a §1983 suit. Today’s post will focus on one of the drawbacks, or limitations, of this type of claim for plaintiffs, namely the ability of government officials who are named defendants to be dismissed from the suit on the grounds their inclusion in duplicative.
Traditional theories of employer’s vicarious liability do not apply to municipalities; rather suits against municipal officials acting in their official capacity are treated as suits against the municipality itself in all but name. Monell, 436 U.S. at 690 n. 5. In cases where both an official sued his official capacity and the employer municipality are named as defendants, courts regularly dismiss the official capacity defendants’ inclusion as duplicative. See generally, Castanza v. Town of Brookhaven, 700 F.Supp.2d 277, 284 (E.D.N.Y. 2010) (granting summary judgment to dismiss claims against defendants in their official capacity as duplicative of the claims against the Town). This leaves only the municipality as a defendant, for whom Monell is the appropriate standard for determining liability. See Monell, 436 U.S. at 694 (imposing liability for official’s “execution of a government's policy or custom, whether made by its lawmakers or by those whose edicts or acts may fairly be said to represent official policy.”).
The defendant officials are still relevant to the case, as their actions relative to official policy will be the lens through which liability is viewed, but they will likely not remain parties to the suit. This likely has raised the question for many people of “why not sue the officials in their personal capacity as well?” The answer is officials will usually be shielded from personal liability by some form of immunity, whether qualified or absolute (ex: judicial, prosecutorial). Thus such claims often prove futile, and plaintiffs decide they are better served by suing the municipality itself, especially as that will be the source of any damages they can establish.
Again, the case is Monell v. Department of Social Services of City of New York, 436 U.S. 658 (1978).
Bringing a §1983 claim against a municipality requires the plaintiff show the existence of a very specific set of circumstances. These circumstances are outlined in the 1978 case Monell v. Department of Social Services of City of New York, 436 U.S. 658 (thus the eponymous “Monell claim”). Specifically, to bring a successful claim under Monell the plaintiff must show (1) the violation of a constitutional right (2) by an official act (3) that resulted from a “government policy or custom.” Mere allegations that a municipality has a policy or custom that violated a plaintiff’s rights are insufficient to hold a municipality liable under §1983, rather it must be proven that the policy or custom not only caused the complained of constitutional violation, but exhibits a “deliberate indifference” to citizens’ rights. Dwares v. City of New York, 985 F.2d. 94, 100-101 (2d Cir. 1993).
(1) the existence of a formal policy which is officially endorsed by the municipality; (2)actions taken or decisions made by municipal officials with final decision making authority, which caused the alleged violation of plaintiff’s civil rights; (3) a practice so persistent and widespread that it constitutes a custom of which constructive knowledge can be implied on the part of the policymaking officials; or (4) a failure by policymakers to properly train or supervise their subordinates, amounting to “deliberate indifference” tothe rights of those who come in contact with the municipal employees.
Castanza v. Town of Brookhaven, 700 F.Supp.2d 277, 287 (E.D.N.Y. 2010); see also Bd. of Cty. Comm’rs of Bryan Cty., Okl. v. Brown, 520 U.S. 397 (1997); Davis v. City of New York, 75 Fed. Appx. 827 (2d Cir. 2003).
Our next post will continue looking at the Monell claim, this time at the implications of Monell for suits in which both a municipality and government officials are named defendants.
This is the fifth and final post in our series looking at Reed v. Town of Gilbert, and it will consider the opinion concurring in judgment written by Justice Kagan (joined by Justices Ginsburg and Breyer). Like Justice Breyer’s opinion this would likely have been a dissent but for the Town of Gilbert’s defenses failing to pass, as Justice Kagan writes, “the laugh test,” let alone strict scrutiny.
Despite finding the Town of Gilbert’s defense sorely lacking and concurring in judgment, Justice Kagan shows serious concern about the majority’s opinion, beginning with some of the signs which will be analyzed and likely fail under strict scrutiny, such as the exemption of signs for historical sites from the federal Highway Beautification Act limits. She writes that the Court has historically been flexible in the application of strict scrutiny to facially content-based laws, and need not have decided the level-of-scrutiny issue. Here, given the Town’s poor defense, the court could have found the Town lacked a sufficient basis for the sign code’s rules without deciding on a broad standard, yet “the majority insists that applying strict scrutiny to all such ordinances is essential to protecting First Amendment freedoms, [but] I find it challenging to understand why that is so.” Given the limited relation between the majority’s opinion and the traditional First Amendment goals of protecting the “marketplace of ideas” and preventing government regulation based on “hostility or favoritism towards the underlying message,” the Court may well come to regret having adopted a hard (and stringent) rule going forward.
It is an open question whether Justice Kagan’s fears regarding the Court becoming the “Supreme Board of Sign Review” will come to pass. Maybe the courts will be flooded by issues such as whether Towns have a compelling interest to tell people “where George Washington slept” or whether there is “no other way to prevent hidden driveway mishaps than by specially treating hidden-driveway signs.” On the other hand, maybe they won’t. Ultimately it will come down to how broadly the lower courts attempt to apply this ruling. If Justice Alito’s concurrence becomes widely adopted as guidance, the parade of horribles may be avoided. Either way, it seems sign cases are going to become significantly more interesting for the foreseeable future.
This is the fourth post in our series looking at Reed v. Town of Gilbert, and it will consider Justice Breyer’s opinion concurring in judgment. Despite reaching the same conclusion as the majority, Justice Breyer advocates for a very different approach in the application of strict scrutiny, and does so in a manner that reads very much like a dissent.
Justice Breyer’s opinion argues for a more nuanced approach to the application of strict scrutiny, writing “while using content discrimination to trigger strict scrutiny sometimes makes perfect sense… it cannot and should not always trigger strict scrutiny.” As applying strict scrutiny leads to “almost certain legal condemnation,” the Court must be more sensitive in its use. Regarding content discrimination in particular, many government regulations discriminating based on content (labeling for prescription drugs, what documents fall under confidentiality laws, tax statements, etc.) provide good examples of where a strong presumption against constitutionality is inappropriate. To address this, Justice Breyer suggests an approach that is admittedly somewhat mechanical, where for public forum or viewpoint discrimination issues, content discrimination is treated as strongly arguing against constitutionality, while in other cases it is simply a factor in measuring the strength of a regulation’s justification. In conclusion, though the Sign Code at issue should rightly be found unconstitutional, strict scrutiny should not have been applied, nor should it be applied to casually going forward.
This is the second post in our series looking at Reed v. Town of Gilbert, and will focus on the majority opinion authored by Justice Thomas, and joined by Chief Justice Roberts as well as Justices Alito, Kennedy, Scalia, and Sotomayor. If you haven’t already read it, I suggest going back to read the introduction segment, which provides an overview of the facts of the case.
The First Amendment prohibits laws “abridging the freedom of speech,” requiring strict scrutiny be applied to content-based regulations of speech, as well as laws that “cannot be justified without reference to” speeches’ content. Writing for the majority, Justice Thomas says that by distinguishing between signs based on their intended message (“influence the outcome of an election” or “direct the public to a qualifying event”), the Town’s Sign Code is content based on its face and thus strict scrutiny applies.
To survive strict scrutiny, the government must present a compelling government interest and show that the regulations are narrowly tailored. The Town provided two potential interests: preserving the Town’s aesthetic and traffic safety, but Justice Thomas writes that even assuming for argument’s sake that these are compelling, there is no evidence that the Code’s distinctions between political, ideological, and TD Signs in any way serve these interests. After all TD Signs are “no greater an eyesore” than ideological or political ones, and… if anything, a sharply worded ideological sign seems more likely to distract a driver than a sign directly the public to a nearby church meeting”. The Sign code thus fails under strict scrutiny.
It is worth noting Justice Thomas also rejects the contention by the Ninth Circuit and the brief for the United States that “a sign regulation is content neutral—even if it expressly draws distinctions based on the sign’s communicative content— if those distinctions can be ‘justified without reference to the content of the regulated speech,” stating that when the law is facially content-based, justification or purpose never enters into the analysis.

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