Opinion ID: 34821
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: What is the applicable First Amendment analysis?

Text: 64 The First Amendment shields speech not only [from] direct limitations... but also [from] adverse government action against ... individual[s] because of [their speech], including the denial of public benefits to punish individuals for their speech. Colson v. Grohman, 174 F.3d 498, 508 (5th Cir.1999). 65 At the outset, the Police Officials contend that their conduct is not actionable under the First Amendment because their decisions on whether and where to enroll officers are discretionary in the sense that no contract required them to enroll their officers in Kinney's and Hall's courses. This assertion overlooks the fundamental point that governmental discretion is always constrained by the Constitution. As the Supreme Court stated in Perry v. Sindermann, the locus classicus of the unconstitutional conditions doctrine: 66 For at least a quarter-century, this Court has made clear that even though a person has no right to a valuable governmental benefit and even though the government may deny him the benefit for any number of reasons, there are some reasons upon which the government may not rely. It may not deny a benefit to a person on a basis that infringes his constitutionally protected interests — especially, his interest in freedom of speech. 67 408 U.S. 593, 597, 92 S.Ct. 2694, 33 L.Ed.2d 570 (1972). The county officials in Umbehr were under no duty to place contracts with the plaintiff's trash-hauling business, nor did the plaintiff have a right to those contracts; it was an at-will relationship. See Umbehr, 518 U.S. at 670-71, 116 S.Ct. 2342. The point of such cases, as we have long made plain, is the government's duty not to punish protected speech, not the citizen's supposed right to government patronage. 24 In the instant case, the district court found sufficient evidence not only that the defendants deprived Kinney and Hall of the benefit of continued enrollment in their courses — a form of public patronage — but also that at least some of the defendants sought to have the instructors removed from the academy altogether. That no contract forbade this is irrelevant. 68 The Police Officials also suggest that their relationship with Kinney and Hall was too attenuated to create the requisite governmental power over the instructors. Specifically, the Police Officials argue that their conduct did not deny Kinney and Hall the benefit of employment because Kilgore College, and not the Police Officials, held the authority to refuse to renew Kinney's and Hall's contracts. We reject this line of argument. The Supreme Court has made it clear that First Amendment protection does not depend on whether the governmental action at issue is direct or indirect. To hold that the Police Officials' conduct cannot constitute a First Amendment violation because they did not directly deprive Kinney and Hall of their jobs, but instead used governmental power to exert economic pressure on the instructors' employer in order to achieve that same result, would allow the government to `produce a result which [it] could not command directly.' Perry, 408 U.S. at 597, 92 S.Ct. 2694 (quoting Speiser v. Randall, 357 U.S. 513, 526, 78 S.Ct. 1332, 2 L.Ed.2d 1460 (1958)) (alteration in original). The defendants' attenuation argument is fundamentally misguided, for the situation in which the economic relationship between the government and the speaker is the most attenuated would be the case in which the speaker is an ordinary citizen with no employment-related ties to the government. In this limiting case for the defendants' attenuation argument, the First Amendment would plainly forbid the government from pressuring the citizen's employer to fire the citizen as punishment for trial testimony that the government disliked. The degree of attenuation present in a given case may well bear on causation — that is, it may be easier for a government official to fire his own employee than to persuade a contractor to fire one of its employees — but this does not change the official's First Amendment duty. We thus reject the defendants' initial arguments that the First Amendment has no bearing on this case. 69 While all citizens enjoy the protections of the First Amendment, the appropriate analytical framework for applying the unconstitutional conditions doctrine to a given First Amendment claim depends on the context in which the claim arose. As the Supreme Court explained in Umbehr, the cases form a spectrum ranging from, at one end, cases involving government employees, whose close relationship with the government requires a balancing of important free speech and government interests and, on the other end, cases involving ordinary citizens whose viewpoints on matters of public concern the government has no legitimate interest in repressing. 518 U.S. at 680, 116 S.Ct. 2342. 70 Because the government has no legitimate interest in denying a benefit to ordinary citizens on account of their speech on matters of public concern, there is no interest balancing involved in the First Amendment analysis for ordinary citizen cases. Rather, the First Amendment is violated in ordinary citizen cases if the individual engaged in conduct protected by the First Amendment and the government took action against the person because of that protected conduct. See, e.g., Rolf v. City of San Antonio, 77 F.3d 823, 827 (5th Cir.1996). In governmental employee cases, by contrast, courts must be attentive to the [t]he government's interest in achieving its goals as effectively and efficiently as possible, which interest is elevated from a relatively subordinate interest when it acts as sovereign to a significant one when it acts as employer. Waters v. Churchill, 511 U.S. 661, 675, 114 S.Ct. 1878, 128 L.Ed.2d 686 (1994) (plurality opinion). 71 The Supreme Court set out the basic analytical structure for governmental employee balancing cases in Pickering v. Board of Education, 391 U.S. at 568, 88 S.Ct. 1731. In that case, the Court held that a board of education violated a teacher's First Amendment rights by discharging him in retaliation for his criticism of the board's budget decisions. Id. at 566, 574-75, 88 S.Ct. 1731. In so holding, the Court emphasized that government employees may [not] constitutionally be compelled to relinquish the First Amendment rights they would otherwise enjoy as citizens to comment on matters of public interest in connection with the operation of the public [institutions] in which they work. Id. at 567-68, 88 S.Ct. 1731. The Court also recognized, however, that the State has interests as an employer in regulating the speech of its employees that differ significantly from those it possesses in connection with regulation of the speech of the citizenry in general. Id. Thus, explained the Court, it is necessary to arrive at a balance between the interests of the teacher, as a citizen, in commenting upon matters of public concern and the interest of the State, as an employer, in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees. Id. at 568, 88 S.Ct. 1731. 72 In Umbehr and its companion case, O'Hare Truck Service, Inc. v. City of Northlake, 518 U.S. 712, 116 S.Ct. 2353, 135 L.Ed.2d 874 (1996), the Supreme Court held that the governmental employee version of the unconstitutional conditions doctrine — that is, the Pickering balancing inquiry — is also appropriate where an independent contractor alleges a First Amendment violation against the government. See O'Hare Truck Serv., 518 U.S. at 720-24, 116 S.Ct. 2353; Umbehr, 518 U.S. at 677-78, 684-85, 116 S.Ct. 2361. The Court reasoned that [i]ndependent government contractors are similar in most relevant respects to government employees. Umbehr, 518 U.S. at 684, 116 S.Ct. 2342. Specifically, the Court noted: 73 The government needs to be free to terminate both employees and contractors for poor performance, to improve the efficiency, efficacy, and responsiveness of service to the public, and to prevent the appearance of corruption. And, absent contractual, statutory, or constitutional restriction, the government is entitled to terminate them for no reason at all. But either type of relationship provides a valuable financial benefit, the threat of the loss of which in retaliation for speech may chill speech on matters of public concern by those who, because of their dealings with the government, are often in the best position to know what ails the agencies for which they work. 74 Id. at 674, 116 S.Ct. 2342 (quoting Waters, 511 U.S. at 674, 114 S.Ct. 1878). 25 75 As we have explained in past cases, the determination whether the relationship between the government and an individual falls on the governmental employee end of the Umbehr spectrum turns on whether the relationship is sufficiently analogous to an employment relationship. See Blackburn v. City of Marshall, 42 F.3d 925, 932 (5th Cir.1995). Applying this standard in Blackburn, we held that the Pickering balancing test was not applicable to a wrecker service owner's First Amendment retaliation claim against police officials for revoking his permission to use the police radio frequency after he criticized the police department's contracting procedures. Id. at 930, 934. The revocation of radio privileges rendered the service unable to participate in a rotation system for removing damaged vehicles from the scenes of accidents. Id. at 930. We reasoned in Blackburn that the business relationship between the wrecker service owner and the police department did not implicate employment-type ties but was instead similar to the relationship between the parties in North Mississippi Communications, another case in which we applied the ordinary citizen version of the unconstitutional conditions doctrine. See Blackburn, 42 F.3d at 934. North Mississippi Communications involved a newspaper's First Amendment claim alleging that county officials had ceased placing legal notices in the newspaper in retaliation for the newspaper's publication of editorials that criticized the board and its members. 792 F.2d at 1337. We did not apply a Pickering balancing test to the newspaper's First Amendment claim, but rather held that it would violate the Constitution for the Board to withhold public patronage, in the form of its advertising, ... in retaliation for that newspaper's exercise of first amendment rights. Id. 76 The parties in this case disagree over which First Amendment analysis — Pickering balancing on the one hand or the ordinary citizen framework on the other — should apply to this case. Earlier, in arguing that their actions did not deny Kinney and Hall any actionable benefits for purposes of the unconstitutional conditions doctrine, the Police Officials emphasized their lack of employment-type ties to Kinney and Hall. In support of their argument regarding the appropriate First Amendment analysis, however, the Police Officials now characterize their relationship with the ETPA and ETPA instructors as sufficiently akin to employment to warrant a balancing of the Police Officials' interests against the free speech interests at stake in this case. Relying on North Mississippi Communications and Worrell v. Henry, 219 F.3d 1197 (10th Cir.2000), Kinney and Hall respond that the ordinary citizen analysis is better suited to the circumstances of the instant case than is the governmental employee test. In Worrell, the Tenth Circuit declined to apply a Pickering balancing test to a First Amendment claim alleging that the law enforcement defendant pressured the plaintiff's employer to rescind the plaintiff's job offer in retaliation for the plaintiff's having testified as an expert witness on behalf of a criminal defendant. See 219 F.3d at 1202, 1209-12. Rather, the Worrell court determined that the appropriate First Amendment analysis for evaluating the plaintiff's claim was the ordinary citizen version of the unconstitutional conditions doctrine. See id. at 1212-13. 77 We agree with the district court and the Police Officials that a Pickering balancing analysis is appropriate in this case. The relationship between the Police Officials and ETPA instructors such as Kinney and Hall implicates governmental interests similar to those involved in the public employment context. Law enforcement agencies have a legitimate interest in exercising discretion over the choice of the instructors who train the officers who will, in turn, carry out the agencies' public duties. Those interests include, for example, ensuring that the instructors are competent and knowledgeable, that they are adept at conveying that knowledge to officer-students, and that they maintain a good working relationship with law enforcement agency officials so that those officials can monitor the training that their officers receive. These interests are all relevant to the ultimate governmental interest that the Pickering balancing analysis is meant to protect, namely the interest in promoting the efficiency of the public services [a law enforcement agency] performs. Pickering, 391 U.S. at 568, 88 S.Ct. 1731. 78 The defendants do not dispute that the instructors spoke on a matter of public concern, nor can they question (in this interlocutory appeal) the district court's factual determinations regarding causation. Accordingly, we now consider whether, under Pickering, the district court correctly balanced the First Amendment interest in protecting Kinney's and Hall's speech against the Police Officials' interests in suppressing it. 79