Opinion ID: 34821
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Are the Police Officials entitled to qualified immunity?

Text: 93 The First Amendment right to free speech was of course clearly established in general terms long before the events giving rise to this case. In order to defeat the Police Officials' claim of qualified immunity, however, Kinney and Hall must show that [t]he contours of the right [were] sufficiently clear that a reasonable official would understand that what he is doing violates that right. Anderson, 483 U.S. at 640, 107 S.Ct. 3034. Qualified immunity should not be denied unless the law is such that reasonable officials should be on notice [that] their conduct is unlawful. Saucier, 533 U.S. at 206, 121 S.Ct. 2151. It bears repeating once more that our factual guide is the district court's view of the record, and the legal question is whether the defendants' conduct violated clearly established law measured against the facts that the district court believed the plaintiffs could prove at trial. See Behrens, 516 U.S. at 313, 116 S.Ct. 834. 94 There is no question that it was clearly established well before October 1998 that Kinney's and Hall's testimony was of public concern and thus was speech protected by the First Amendment. 35 The Police Officials do not attempt to argue otherwise, but rather suggest that it was not clear that the First Amendment imposed any restrictions on their conduct vis-á-vis Kinney and Hall as their training instructors. This, of course, is the same argument we rejected earlier, in discussing whether Kinney and Hall had set forth evidence of conduct that would amount to a constitutional violation at all. In arguing for qualified immunity, the Police Officials contend that there was at least a reasonable legal basis for their view, even if it was ultimately wrong. More specifically, the Police Officials say that their duties with respect to Kinney and Hall were unclear because the instructors were employees of a `disappointed bidder' — i.e., Kilgore College. The Police Officials apparently base this contention in part on the Umbehr Court's admonishment that [b]ecause [this] suit concerns the termination of a pre-existing commercial relationship with the government, we need not address the possibility of suits by bidders or applicants for new government contracts who cannot rely on such a relationship. 518 U.S. at 685, 116 S.Ct. 2342. 95 Initially, we reject the defendants' attempt to characterize Kinney and Hall as employees of a disappointed bidder. Neither Kilgore College nor ETPA instructors such as Kinney and Hall were mere bidders in the sense that they lacked a pre-existing commercial relationship of the sort that the Court was concerned about in Umbehr — i.e., a relationship that the Police Officials could use to inhibit speech. See id. at 674, 116 S.Ct. 2342 (reasoning that a Pickering balancing analysis is appropriate in cases involving the government's independent contractors or providers of regular services as well as its employees because both type[s] of relationship provide[] a valuable financial benefit, the threat of the loss of which in retaliation for speech may chill speech on matters of public concern). The Police Officials had the power to deny Kinney and Hall significant benefits as ETPA instructors, and it is the existence of that sort of power — and not mere labels describing governmental relationships — that is relevant for purposes of the First Amendment. See O'Hare Truck Serv., 518 U.S. at 721-22, 116 S.Ct. 2353; Umbehr, 518 U.S. at 678-79, 116 S.Ct. 2361. 96 More fundamentally, we reject the Police Officials' suggestion that it would have been reasonable for officers in their positions to believe that they were unfettered by the First Amendment merely because their economic relationship with Kinney and Hall was non-employment and non-contractual. Both the Supreme Court and this court have explicitly rejected such reasoning. In O'Hare Truck Service, the Court rejected the proposition ... that those who perform the government's work outside the formal employment relationship are subject to what we conclude is the direct and specific abridgment of First Amendment rights. 518 U.S. at 720, 116 S.Ct. 2353. Similarly, in Blackburn, we stated that the assumption that only public employees enjoy the protections of the First Amendment rested on inverted reasoning because [e]very citizen enjoys the First Amendment's protections against governmental interference with free speech. 42 F.3d at 931. As we explained in Blackburn, the Supreme Court did not formulate the governmental employee version of the unconstitutional conditions doctrine in order to limit the First Amendment to the public employment context, but rather in order to take into account that the First Amendment rights of public employees are restricted by the nature of the employer-employee relationship. Id. Indeed, the Supreme Court's decisions in Pickering, Umbehr, and O'Hare Truck Service are predicated on the assumption that although the government may have other relationships with individuals in addition to the citizen-sovereign relationship, individuals do not, as a result of such relationships, cease to be citizens with First Amendment rights that the government is obligated to respect. Thus, we have little difficulty concluding that the Police Officials would be unreasonable in failing to recognize that they had First Amendment obligations toward Kinney and Hall. 97 Part VI.A of this opinion determined that the Police Officials were entitled to have the plaintiffs' First Amendment claim analyzed under a Pickering balancing inquiry, a framework that recognizes the Police Officials' legitimate interests in suppressing some speech that interferes with the provision of public services. To the extent that there was any uncertainty about the proper analytical framework, the uncertainty could not redound to the defendants' benefit, as the alternative would have been to hold the Police Officials to the higher standards that they must observe with respect to ordinary citizens. It is plain that the government cannot harry the employer of an ordinary citizen who gave unwelcome testimony, seeking to have the employee fired in retaliation. Giving the Police Officials the benefit of the Pickering balancing test, we must ask whether it was clearly established at the time of the Police Officials' conduct that the First Amendment forbade them from retaliating against Kinney and Hall, the employees of their contractor, on account of the instructors' Kerrville testimony. We conclude that it was. 98 Given that it is well-established in the jurisprudence of both the Supreme Court and this court that official misconduct is of great First Amendment significance, and that this court has repeatedly emphasized the need to protect speech regarding police misconduct in particular, see, e.g., Brawner, 855 F.2d at 192, it would have been objectively unreasonable for an officer to conclude that Kinney's and Hall's testimony was anything other than highly valuable speech. 36 Suppressing that speech could be justified, they should have realized, only by a weighty governmental interest. See Matherne v. Wilson, 851 F.2d 752, 761 (5th Cir.1988) (explaining that a greater disruption must be shown when the speech is of greater public concern). 99 As explained earlier, at this stage of the case it is disputed whether the Police Officials' legitimate interests were threatened by Kinney and Hall. The district court found that it was disputed whether the instructors' testimony in Kerrville disrupted, and even legitimately could disrupt, the Police Officials' training objectives. Kinney, 111 F.Supp.2d at 843. On this record, the Police Officials' asserted interest in loyalty is unreasonable given the events at issue; certainly such interests cannot justify an attempt to force the instructors out of the academy altogether. Viewing the summary judgment facts in the light most favorable to the non-movants, the Police Officials pursued Kinney and Hall not because of genuine conflicts of interest but instead merely because Kinney and Hall had testified against a police officer. Id. at 838-39, 843, 845. When the disputed facts are viewed from the perspective of the plaintiffs' evidence — and that is the only perspective allowed on this interlocutory appeal, see Behrens, 516 U.S. at 313, 116 S.Ct. 834 — the illegality of the Police Officials' actions is readily apparent. Summary judgment is therefore inappropriate. 100 The Police Officials contend that their conduct was reasonable in light of the fact that, when the boycott started in October 1998, the Texas Legislature and Texas A&M University had enacted policies that effectively prohibited state employees from serving as expert witnesses against the state, ostensibly because of inherent conflicts of interest. See Hoover v. Morales, 164 F.3d 221, 223-24 (5th Cir.1998) (describing the policies). But the Police Officials could hardly have reasonably relied on these state policies as support for their own stand against purported conflicts of interest: The state policies had been challenged as violative of free speech, and a federal judge had preliminarily enjoined their enforcement on August 7, 1997, over a year before the boycott. This court affirmed that decision in an opinion issued July 23, 1998. 37 It would therefore have been unreasonable to rely on these state policies for guidance on the meaning of the First Amendment. 101 In any event, we had spoken to such issues long before the controversy over the policies at issue in Hoover. For example, we held in Rainey v. Jackson State College that a teacher stated a claim under the First Amendment when a state college denied him employment in retaliation for his expert testimony for the defendant in a criminal obscenity case. See 435 F.2d at 1034 ( Rainey I ). In a later appeal of the same case, we noted that a college trustee had admitted that the plaintiff was denied the teaching position because of his testimony and the publicity surrounding the same; we observed that [t]hese facts make out what appear to us to be a clear case of impermissibly freighting plaintiff's contract with a deprivation of the First Amendment right to free speech, and we ultimately held that the plaintiff was entitled to a judgment as a matter of law. Rainey v. Jackson State Coll., 481 F.2d 347, 350 (5th Cir.1973) ( Rainey II ). 38 The Rainey decisions are themselves part of a long series of First Amendment cases in which we have condemned retaliation against court testimony, including retaliation against employees who gave testimony adverse to their employers' interests. See Johnston, 869 F.2d at 1568 (county employee fired for testifying on co-worker's behalf in an administrative hearing); Reeves, 828 F.2d at 1097-99 (school employee demoted for her civil testimony in favor of her co-employee against their employer). 102 Judge Jones's dissent discusses in some detail three cases from other circuits that, in her estimation, show that the defendants did not violate the First Amendment and should in any event be entitled to qualified immunity. Only one of these, the Third Circuit's decision in Green, was on the books when the Police Officials began their activities. 39 The plaintiff in Green, a police officer on a drug task force, agreed to testify as a character witness at the bail hearing of the son of a longtime friend. 105 F.3d at 884. The plaintiff left the hearing without testifying after he learned that the son was associated with organized crime. Id. The police agency demoted the officer anyway, citing their interest in avoiding the appearance of an association with organized crime. Id. at 884-85. Surely it would cast a police agency into disrepute if its vice officers were thought to consort with mob figures, but the Police Officials in this appeal cannot seriously claim that their agencies will be exposed to public obloquy if a police instructor they patronize testifies for the plaintiff in an excessive force case, just as he has before testified in favor of the police. 40 Green in no way supports the Police Officials' actions. 103 While some of the relevant First Amendment retaliation precedents in place in the fall of 1998 involved schools (like the Rainey cases and Reeves ), and others of them (such as Brawner and Victor ) have involved police departments, we concede that our past cases do not include one that has specifically addressed retaliation against instructors at a police academy. We do not see the absence of such a case as an embarrassment to our conclusion that the Police Officials are not entitled to qualified immunity. If we accepted the defendants' view of what it means for the law to be clearly established, qualified immunity would be available in almost every case, even those cases in which in the light of pre-existing law the unlawfulness [was] apparent, Anderson, 483 U.S. at 640, 107 S.Ct. 3034. As the Supreme Court has recently admonished, officials can still be on notice that their conduct violates established law even in novel factual circumstances. Hope, 536 U.S. at 741, 122 S.Ct. 2508. 104 Although we are sensitive to the fact that reasonable officials might not always be able to predict the outcome of a balancing test such as that used in Pickering cases, see Noyola v. Tex. Dep't of Human Res., 846 F.2d 1021, 1025 (5th Cir.1988), 41 we believe that in this case the illegality of the Police Officials' conduct is sufficiently clear that they can fairly be said to have been on notice of the impropriety of their actions. Indeed, given the factual disputes identified by the district court and taking the plaintiffs' side of those disputes, this case does not require any real balancing at all, for the Police Officials do not have any relevant, legitimate interests to put on their side of the Pickering scales. Our cases show that it is entirely appropriate to deny qualified immunity when the balance of cognizable interests weighs so starkly in the plaintiff's favor. See, e.g., Boddie, 989 F.2d at 750; Frazier, 873 F.2d at 826. This means that summary judgment must sometimes be denied in Pickering cases because of genuine factual disputes concerning whether admittedly legally important government interests are implicated on a given record. See, e.g., Branton, 272 F.3d at 741; Kennedy, 224 F.3d at 378-79; Victor, 150 F.3d at 457; see also supra note 29 (citing cases from other circuits). Of course, the ultimate resolution of those factual disputes may show that the Police Officials are entitled to qualified immunity from liability. See supra note 8. 105 We close our discussion of qualified immunity by noting that, contrary to the position asserted by the Police Officials, the district court's review of the reasons for the Police Officials' boycott does not mean that the lower court, or this court, has engaged in a subjective analysis of the type condemned in Harlow. The Police Officials' position, apparently, is that they are entitled to qualified immunity as long as there exists some conceivable set of reasons that would have made their actions appropriate. Such factual scenarios doubtless exist. It would have been permissible for the Police Officials to pull their students out of Kinney's and Hall's classes if (for instance) the Police Officials learned that the instructors were unskilled. Therefore, the Police Officials suggest, we necessarily engage in a forbidden subjective inquiry if we take cognizance of a genuine dispute over the reasons for their actions against the instructors. What the defendants' approach would mean, of course, is that there can never be liability for any violation for which the elements include the official's intent or reasons for action. Most § 1983 claims do not include such an element, but First Amendment retaliation claims do: The First Amendment protects employees only from termination because of their speech on matters of public concern, Umbehr, 518 U.S. at 675, 116 S.Ct. 2342, not from termination simpliciter. Similarly, the Constitution forbids officials from discriminating on the basis of race only when their discrimination is intentional. See Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. 229, 239-48, 96 S.Ct. 2040, 48 L.Ed.2d 597 (1976). In such cases, reading Harlow as forbidding all discussion of intent would allow the qualified immunity defense to preclude recovery even when the law was clearly established, for plaintiffs would be barred from proving an essential legal element of their case. 42 106 When an official's intent or the reasons for his or her actions are an essential element of the underlying violation, we have treated factual disputes over intent just like any other factual dispute that can justify a denial of qualified immunity. See Tompkins v. Vickers, 26 F.3d 603, 607-10 (5th Cir.1994) (holding that the existence of a retaliatory motive was a factual issue that precluded summary judgment on qualified immunity in a First Amendment case in which a teacher claimed that he had been transferred in retaliation for criticizing the school superintendent); see also Coleman v. Houston Indep. Sch. Dist., 113 F.3d 528, 535 & n. 6 (5th Cir.1997) (stating that the court lacks jurisdiction on interlocutory appeal to review whether there is a genuine issue of fact as to intentional discrimination). Other circuits take the same view. 43 107 As we have said, accepting the Police Officials' position would mean that every claim of qualified immunity would necessarily be upheld in those categories of cases that require proof of intent or motive. The proper approach, which treats intent as one fact issue among others, does not lead to the opposite extreme, namely that qualified immunity is never available in such cases. That too would be an intolerable result. Fortunately, in no area of the law can bare accusations of malice or evil intent withstand a properly supported motion for summary judgment. See Celotex Corp. v. Catrett, 477 U.S. 317, 324, 106 S.Ct. 2548, 91 L.Ed.2d 265 (1986); Krim v. BancTexas Group, Inc., 989 F.2d 1435, 1449 (5th Cir.1993) (stating that unsupported assertions of bad faith cannot create a genuine issue of fact; in such a case, summary judgment is proper even if intent is an essential element of the nonmoving party's case). Insubstantial suits against public officials can be handled through the firm application of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Butz, 438 U.S. at 508, 98 S.Ct. 2894, including the restrictions on discovery available in Rule 26. 44 The case before us is not a case in which a plaintiff seeks to impugn an otherwise legitimate official action by casting bare accusations of malice, bad faith, and retaliatory animus. Kinney and Hall showed the district court sufficient evidence, both direct and circumstantial, and much of which came from the defendants' own words, to raise a genuine issue of fact as to their claims. 108 The Police Officials' conduct, as presented in the summary judgment record and viewed in the plaintiffs' favor, was objectively unreasonable in light of clearly established First Amendment law. The district court therefore correctly determined that the Police Officials are not entitled, at least at this point, to qualified immunity from Kinney's and Hall's § 1983 claims alleging violations of their rights to freedom of speech under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.