Opinion ID: 556612
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Rejection of the Qualified Immunity Defense

Text: 44 Scott and Switzer argue that even assuming that Vasbinder established that they unlawfully retaliated against him for exercising his First Amendment rights, they are protected by the doctrine of qualified immunity. That doctrine shields state officials from liability for damages if their actions did not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known, Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818, 102 S.Ct. 2727, 2738, 73 L.Ed.2d 396 (1982), or even where the rights were clearly established, if it was objectively reasonable for the defendants to believe that their acts did not violate those rights, see Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U.S. 635, 638, 107 S.Ct. 3034, 3038, 97 L.Ed.2d 523 (1987); Robison v. Via, 821 F.2d 913, 921 (2d Cir.1987). The official does not have such immunity where the contours of the right were sufficiently clear that a reasonable official would understand that what he is doing violates that right. Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U.S. at 640, 107 S.Ct. at 3039. 45 The district court here ruled that the law was clear at the time of the retaliation against Vasbinder, which commenced in November 1982, that defendants' actions would violate his First Amendment rights. We agree. It was established at least as early as 1968 in Pickering v. Board of Education that a state employee's good-faith public criticism of the allocation of public funds, was constitutionally protected where the efficiency of the public service the state was performing was not impaired thereby. 391 U.S. at 568, 569-73, 88 S.Ct. at 1734, 1735-37. In Dobosz v. Walsh, 892 F.2d 1135, 1141-42 (2d Cir.1989), this Court ruled that it was clearly established in 1981 that a municipal policeman cooperating with the FBI in an investigation of charges against another policeman was exercising his First Amendment right to free speech, and that the defendant who retaliated by suspending him was therefore not entitled to qualified immunity. In Rookard v. Health & Hospitals Corp., 710 F.2d 41, we dealt with another retaliatory demotion occurring in 1981 as a result of complaints of corrupt and wasteful practices, communicated by a municipal hospital's director of nursing to a city official empowered to investigate. Noting that the charges involved a matter of public concern, that Rookard was demoted because of her complaints, and that there was no suggestion that Rookard's complaints, though irritating to her superior, in any way impaired her ability to perform her job or interfered with the operations of the hospital, we ruled that she had so plainly established a prima facie violation of her First Amendment rights that the district court, in a bench trial, could not properly dismiss at the close of Rookard's case. 46 Defendants rely principally on Giacalone v. Abrams, 850 F.2d 79, for the proposition that they could not have been expected to know that retaliation against Vasbinder for going to the FBI would violate his First Amendment rights. Their reliance is misplaced. Giacalone involved a state employee who was concerned with the legal interpretation of a provision of federal tax law and was insisten[t] on having his [legal] conclusions control the handling of [a] tax dispute. Id. at 88. Though in the litigation the employee advanced other concerns going to more serious matters of potential impropriety, he had not in fact expressed any such concern prior to being fired. On those facts, we concluded that under the general standard established in Pickering and its progeny, it remained objectively reasonable for the state to believe that the termination of such an employee would not violate his First Amendment rights. 47 Giacalone thus is easily distinguishable from the present case, as the matters communicated there were considerably less weighty than Vasbinder's communication as to possible fraud and theft. The present case is not meaningfully distinguishable from Dobosz and Rookard. Here, as in Dobosz, the employee communicated matters of possible malfeasance to the FBI; here, as in Rookard, the employee complained about misuse of public funds. In both Dobosz and Rookard, the retaliatory personnel actions occurred in 1981, and we found that the violation of the plaintiffs' First Amendment rights was clear. The unlawfulness of such retaliation had not become less clear by the time of the Scott-Switzer retaliation against Vasbinder in 1982 and 1983. 48