Opinion ID: 216201
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Ms. Leverington's Claim Against Officer Peters

Text: Although the Garcetti/Pickering test applies to Ms. Leverington's claim against Memorial, she argues that her claim against Peters instead should be evaluated under the three-part inquiry we set forth in Worrell v. Henry, 219 F.3d 1197, 1212 (10th Cir.2000), which applies to First Amendment retaliation claims against defendants other than the plaintiff's employers. Couch, 587 F.3d at 1238. For the reasons discussed below, we conclude that Ms. Leverington is correct, and that the Worrell test applies to her claim against Peters.
The framework set forth in Pickering and Garcetti is traditionally applied in free-speech cases in which the public employer is the same individual or entity that takes the adverse action at issue against the employee. See Worrell, 219 F.3d at 1209-10 (noting that the Pickering balancing has been most frequently applied to adverse actions taken by employersindividuals. . . who have the authority to make hiring and firing decisions and take other personnel actions.). The Court in Worrell was presented with a slightly different situation; specifically, a free-speech retaliation claim by a public employee against a third party for allegedly causing the employee-plaintiff's employer to take the adverse action at issue. Id. The plaintiff in Worrell was a former FBI agent who, in 1986, testified as an expert for the defense in a criminal case involving the killing of an undercover agent for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (OBNDD). Id. at 1201. This testimony generated considerable anger among OBNDD agents. Id. at 1202. Approximately nine years later, the plaintiff applied for an investigative position with the District Attorney's office for the Twentieth Judicial District of Oklahoma, and was offered a position as coordinator for the District Attorney's drug task force. Id. However, the District Attorney subsequently rescinded the offer after an OBNDD agent, who had previously offered the assistance of the OBNDD to the task force, informed the District Attorney that he did not trust the plaintiff and would not work with him, based partly on the plaintiff's testimony nine years earlier. Id. The District Attorney explained to the plaintiff that he was rescinding the offer because he was concerned that the OBNDD would not cooperate or coordinate with the task force if the plaintiff were hired, and he (the District Attorney) felt that the cooperation and coordination of the OBNDD was essential. Id. The plaintiff sued the District Attorney, the OBNDD agent, and certain of the agent's superiors for violation of the plaintiff's free-speech rights under the First Amendment. Id. at 1203. The court applied the Pickering test to the plaintiff's claims against the District Attorney as the plaintiff's prospective employer, and concluded that the plaintiff could not satisfy the balancing prong as a matter of law. Id. at 1207-09. However, with respect to the OBNDD agents, the Court found that there were serious risks in applying the Pickering balancing test to retaliation claims against an official outside the employing agency, because to do so could effectively give such a third party an impermissible veto over the employer's personnel or contractual decisions. Id. at 1210. Specifically, a third party, upon whose cooperation an employer depended, could refuse to cooperate with the employer unless a particular employee was fired, demoted, or transferred. Id. at 1210-11. In this way, the third party could effectively create the very workplace disruption that, under the Pickering approach, could be used to justify the limitation of First Amendment rights. Id. at 1211. Instead, the Court set forth a three-part test to be used in free-speech retaliation claims against a defendant who is not the plaintiff's employer and when there is no contractual relationship between them. Id. at 1212. In order to succeed on such a claim, a plaintiff must prove: (1) that the plaintiff was engaged in constitutionally protected activity; (2) that the defendant's actions caused the plaintiff to suffer an injury that would chill a person of ordinary firmness from continuing to engage in that activity; and (3) that the defendant's adverse action was substantially motivated as a response to the plaintiff's exercise of constitutionally protected conduct. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted).
As the above discussion makes clear, the Worrell test applies to retaliation claims in which the defendant is not the plaintiff's employer and when there is no contractual relationship between them. Id. ; see also Couch, 587 F.3d at 1238 (citing Worrell as applying in First Amendment retaliation claims against defendants other than the plaintiff's employers). Here, Officer Peters is not Ms. Leverington's employer, and there is no contractual relationship between them. Accordingly, Worrell applies to Ms. Leverington's cause of action against Peters. [7] Peters nonetheless advances two arguments for why the Garcetti/Pickering test should apply to Ms. Leverington's claim against him. First, he argues that  Worrell only applies to claims against officials outside the plaintiff's employing entity, and that he and Ms. Leverington ultimately both work for the same employer, i.e., the City of Colorado Springs. (Aple. Br. at 7.) Second, Peters argues that even if he and Ms. Leverington work for two separate entities, they are so intertwined under the single-employer test that the Garcetti/Pickering framework should be applied to Ms. Leverington's claim against him. (Aple. Br. at 12-13 n. 6.) Neither of these arguments has merit. With respect to his first argument that he and Ms. Leverington work for the same legal entity, Peters first contends that under Colorado law, only municipalities, and not their various enterprises or departments, are bodies politic and corporate that may sue or be sued. ( Id. at 8.) From there, Peters asserts that (1) the City's powers are vested in the City Council (Council); (2) Memorial's Board of Trustees (the Board) is subject to the general supervision and control of the Council in numerous ways; (3) Memorial employees are City employees; (4) the Colorado Springs Police Department (the CSPD) is a department of the City created by the Council; and (5) the Chief of Police reports to the City Manager, who is appointed by the Council and serves at the Council's pleasure. Peters maintains that, taken together, these facts show that Memorial and the CSPD are not legal entities separate from the City, because the Council has ultimate control and responsibility over decisions made by Memorial and the [CSPD]. (Aple. Br. at 12.) In Peters's view, this puts Ms. Leverington's claims in the same category as traditional public-employee free-speech claims. Peters, however, provides no authority for the proposition that Worrell does not apply simply where the plaintiff's and defendant's ultimate governing or parent entity is the same. [8] Indeed, Worrell itself involved such facts. In Worrell, the plaintiff's would-be employer (the District Attorney's office) and the defendant agent's employer (the OBNDD) were both state agencies. See 19 Okla. Stat. § 215.1 (2010) (creating the office of district attorney in the State of Oklahoma); 63 Okla. Stat. § 2-102 (2010) (establishing the Oklahoma State Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control). What was significant for the court in Worrell, however, was the fact that the OBNDD agents had no authority to hire the plaintiff or rescind the offer, and thus were outside the employing agency. 219 F.3d at 1210. The same circumstances are present in this case, as Peters does not claim to have had any authority to make any employment decisions on behalf of Memorial with respect to Ms. Leverington. Peters's second argumentthat the single-employer test dictates the application of the Garcetti/Pickering test fares no better. The single-employer test looks to whether two nominally separate entities should in fact be treated as an integrated enterprise. Bristol v. Bd. of Cnty. Comm'rs, 312 F.3d 1213, 1218 (10th Cir.2002) (en banc). Courts applying the single-employer test generally weigh four factors: (1) interrelations of operation; (2) common management; (3) centralized control of labor relations; and (4) common ownership and financial control. Id. at 1220 (internal quotation marks omitted). Although the test has been employed in contexts such as Title VII, see Lockard v. Pizza Hut, Inc., 162 F.3d 1062, 1069-70 (10th Cir.1998) (describing use in Title VII cases), Peters fails to cite any caseand this Court could find nonein which a court has applied the test to a First Amendment free-speech claim. Instead, Peters's single-employer test argument is based entirely on one footnote in Worrell, in which the court acknowledged that there may be instances in which the operations of a third party agency are so intertwined with the operations of the employing agency that the Pickering balancing should be applied. Worrell, 219 F.3d at 1212 n. 3. The Worrell court noted that, [i]n other contexts, courts have held that one company or agency may be held liable for another company or agency's wrongful conduct if the companies or agencies constitute a `single employer.' Id. However, the court expressly declined to decide whether a `single employer' approach may be applied such that nonemployer defendants may be afforded the benefit of the Pickering balancing. Id. Thus, it is far from clear that the single-employer test is appropriate for evaluating the proper framework under which to consider free-speech, public-employee retaliation claims. Indeed, in Sandoval v. City of Boulder, Colo., this Court noted that other courts have been particularly cautious in finding that two nominally separate state or municipal governmental entities are in fact a single employer, since such a conclusion effectively negates what we assume was a state's conscious choice to create distinct organizations. 388 F.3d 1312, 1323 n. 3 (10th Cir.2004). Absent some indication that the state's decision was motivated by a desire to circumvent the civil rights laws or other laws, principles of comity counsel federal courts not to be too quick to erase organizational dividing lines drawn up by state authorities. Id. In any event, even assuming that the single-employer test is appropriate to apply in this context, Peters's argument fails. First, he does not separately address any of the factors relevant to a single-employer analysis, but rather asserts that the relationships between the Council, on the one hand, and Memorial and the CSPD, on the other, clearly establish that the single employer test is met. (Aple. Br. at 12-13 n. 6.) This analysis misses the mark. The test is whether the operations of Memorial, as the employing agency, and the CSPD, as the third party agency, are so intertwined as to constitute a single employer. Worrell, 219 F.3d at 1212 n. 3. That the Council retains some measure of authority or control over Memorial and the CSPD individually is insufficient to satisfy the test as contemplated by Worrell. [9] In short, there is no basis for applying the Garcetti/Pickering analysis to Ms. Leverington's claims against Peters. Instead, the Worrell test applies.
Having decided that the Worrell test applies to Ms. Leverington's claim against Peters, it is apparent that her claim was properly dismissed because Peters is entitled to qualified immunity with respect to the first prong of the this test. Specifically, it was not clearly established that Ms. Leverington was engaging in constitutionally protected activity when she made her statement to Peters. The doctrine of qualified immunity protects government officials from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known. Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U.S. 223, 129 S.Ct. 808, 815, 172 L.Ed.2d 565 (2009) (internal quotation marks omitted). In resolving a motion to dismiss based on qualified immunity, a court must consider whether the facts that a plaintiff has alleged. . . make out a violation of a constitutional right, and whether the right at issue was clearly established at the time of defendant's alleged misconduct. Id. at 816 (internal quotation marks omitted). The Supreme Court in Pearson made clear that courts have discretion to decide which of the two prongs of the qualified immunity analysis should be addressed first in light of the circumstances in the particular case at hand. Id. at 818. The relevant, dispositive inquiry in determining whether a right is clearly established is whether it would be clear to a reasonable officer that his conduct was unlawful in the situation he confronted. Thomas v. Durastanti, 607 F.3d 655, 669 (10th Cir.2010) (internal quotation marks omitted). In this case, it was not clearly established that Ms. Leverington's statement to Peters did not constitute a true threat unprotected by the First Amendment. See Nielander v. Bd. of Cnty. Comm'rs, 582 F.3d 1155, 1168 (10th Cir. 2009) (distinguishing between protected speech and unprotected threats). In Nielander, we found that because it was debatable whether a reasonable officer would have considered the plaintiff's statement to be a threat, we cannot say that the applicable law [was] clearly established such that [the defendant] acted unreasonably in writing a probable cause determination. 582 F.3d at 1169. We therefore held that where a question of ultimate fact (in this case, whether a reasonable officer would be unreasonable in concluding that [a statement] was a true threat under clearly established federal law) cannot be resolved as a matter of law, the law is not clearly established and qualified immunity is appropriate. Id. Here, even drawing all reasonable inferences in favor of Ms. Leverington, it is debatable whether a reasonable officer in Peters's position would have considered her statement to be a threat. Accordingly, Ms. Leverington's free-speech rights in this context were not clearly established, and Peters is entitled to qualified immunity on this basis. In addition, it was not clearly established that Ms. Leverington's statement was protected for another reasonas discussed above, it was not on a matter of public concern. We have stated in the Garcetti/Pickering context that the public-concern test determines whether a government employees speech is protected. See Dixon, 553 F.3d at 1303-04 (applying public-concern test to determine whether a government employee's speech is constitutionally protected); Brammer-Hoelter, 492 F.3d at 1203 (If the speech is not a matter of public concern, then the speech is unprotected and the inquiry ends.); Worrell, 219 F.3d at 1205 (stating, in applying Pickering test, that only matters of public concern . . . are protected by the First Amendment in this context). Thus, in order to survive the first prong of Worrell, Ms. Leverington would have to establish that the public-concern test does not apply to a free-speech retaliation claim under Worrell. We have substantial doubt that this is the case. Whether an employer's adverse employment action is permissible depends on whether the employee's speech is on a matter of public concernif not on a matter of public concern, we deem the employer's action to be permissible under the First Amendment. It would make little sense to punish third parties for chilling private speech that does not enjoy protection from the government employer. If the First Amendment does not protect Ms. Leverington against the consequences of her statement (termination by Memorial), then it would be incongruous to nonetheless impute liability to Peters. We note that the Supreme Court in its recent Phelps decision underscored the importance of the public-concern inquiry in determining how much protection is afforded to speech: Whether the First Amendment prohibits holding [defendants] liable for [their] speech in this case turns largely on whether that speech is of public or private concern, as determined by all the circumstances of the case. [S]peech on matters of public concern . . . is at the heart of the First Amendment's protection. The First Amendment reflects a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open. That is because speech concerning public affairs is more than self-expression; it is the essence of self-government. Accordingly, speech on public issues occupies the highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values, and is entitled to special protection. [N]ot all speech is of equal First Amendment importance, however, and where matters of purely private significance are at issue, First Amendment protections are often less rigorous. That is because restricting speech on purely private matters does not implicate the same constitutional concerns as limiting speech on matters of public interest: [T]here is no threat to the free and robust debate of public issues; there is no potential interference with a meaningful dialogue of ideas; and the threat of liability does not pose the risk of a reaction of self-censorship on matters of public import. Snyder v. Phelps, ___ U.S. ___, 131 S.Ct. 1207, 1215-16, 179 L.Ed.2d 172 (2011) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). However, we need notand do notdecide here whether the public-concern test applies in the context of a Worrell inquiry. It is sufficient that the law was not clearly established on this point, and thus that Peters is entitled to qualified immunity on this basis as well. [10]