Opinion ID: 171452
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Heading: Whether Mr. Thomas's Speech Was Constitutionally Protected

Text: The United State Supreme Court's decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos set the boundaries of what constitutes protected employee speech. 547 U.S. 410, 126 S.Ct. 1951, 164 L.Ed.2d 689 (2006). Garcetti recognized that the First Amendment limits the ability of a public employer to leverage the employment relationship to restrict, incidentally or intentionally, the liberties employees enjoy in their capacities as private citizens. Id. at 419, 126 S.Ct. 1951. However, employee speech that is made pursuant to the employee's professional duties is not accorded First Amendment protection under Garcetti. Id. at 420, 421, 126 S.Ct. 1951. This is because, the Court explained, [r]estricting speech that owes its existence to a public employee's professional responsibilities does not infringe any liberties the employee might have enjoyed as a private citizen. It simply reflects the exercise of employer control over what the employer itself has commissioned or created. Id. at 421-22, 126 S.Ct. 1951. Garcetti involved the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office. A prosecutor, named Ceballos, prepared an internal office memorandum recommending dismissal of a case that was being pursued by the office. The memo and another like it led to a heated meeting; afterwards, Ceballos was reassigned from his position, transferred to another courthouse, and denied a promotion. Id. Ceballos sued, claiming the employment actions violated his constitutional rights. The Court found that Ceballos's statements, made directly to his supervisors and also in a memorandum, were made pursuant to his official duties and therefore not protected under the First Amendment. Id. at 422, 424, 126 S.Ct. 1951. The Court explained that Ceballos was speaking in his role as a prosecutor fulfilling a responsibility to advise his supervisor about how best to proceed. Id. at 421, 126 S.Ct. 1951. The speech was therefore commissioned by his employer. Id. 421-22, 126 S.Ct. 1951. Ceballos was not so much a private citizen exercising free speech rights as an employee whose job consisted in part of speech, for which he could be evaluated, rewarded, or disciplined. Because the First Amendment does not prohibit managerial discipline based on an employee's expressions made pursuant to official responsibilities, Ceballos' claim of unconstitutional retaliation failed. Id. at 424, 126 S.Ct. 1951. The question under Garcetti is not whether the speech was made during the employee's work hours, or whether it concerned the subject matter of his employment. See id. at 421, 126 S.Ct. 1951. Merely because an employee's speech was made at work and about work does not necessarily remove that employee's speech from the ambit of constitutional protection. See Brammer-Hoelter, 492 F.3d at 1204. Rather, it is whether the speech was made pursuant to the employee's job duties or, in other words, whether the speech was commissioned by the employer. Garcetti, 547 U.S. at 421-22, 126 S.Ct. 1951. In addressing that question, the Supreme Court deliberately refrained from defining a comprehensive framework for defining the scope of an employee's duties. Id. at 424, 126 S.Ct. 1951. It instead emphasized that the inquiry was a practical one, and that a court cannot simply read off an employee's duties from a job description because formal job descriptions often bear little resemblance to the duties an employee actually is expected to perform. Id. at 424-25, 126 S.Ct. 1951. In this case, Mr. Thomas's supervisor, Monte Ketchum, conceded that Mr. Thomas's official duties did not include a duty to contact the OSBI for perceived criminal violations. But that is not the end of the matter. The inquiry is a practical one, and the defendants argue that Mr. Thomas's speech, including his decision to take the matter to the OSBI, was about the type of work and responsibilities of his work at the City. Mr. Thomas was in charge of housing inspection; his signature was on certificates for houses he had approved for occupancy. He was aware that the certificate for the house on Houser Lane was fraudulent only because of his official duty as a housing inspector. Moreover, as stressed by the defendants, the alleged fact that a false certificate had been prepared would be relevant to Thomas's performance of his job. He would be expected to report such an occurrence at least to those higher up his chain of command. This Court's precedents since Garcetti have taken a broad view of the meaning of speech that is pursuant to an employee's official duties. Raj Chohan, Note, Tenth Circuit Interpretations of Garcetti: Limits on First Amendment Protections for Whistle-Blowers, 85 DENV. U.L.REV. 573, 584 (2008). In Brammer-Hoelter, we stated that speech may be made pursuant to an employee's official duties even if it deals with activities that the employee is not expressly required to perform. 492 F.3d 1192, 1203. Therefore the fact that it was not expressly Mr. Thomas's duty to report to the OSBI is not dispositive on whether he was acting pursuant to his duties. Indeed, in Brammer-Hoelter, we held that if speech reasonably contributes to or facilitates the employee's performance of the official duty, the speech is made pursuant to the employee's official duties. Id. at 1203 (citing Williams v. Dallas Indep. Sch. Dist., 480 F.3d 689, 693 (5th Cir.2007)) (per curiam). See also Green v. Bd. of County Comm'rs, 472 F.3d 794, 801 (10th Cir.2007) (Green's activities not protected because they stemmed from and were the type of activities that she was paid to do). On the other hand, it would be going too far to hold that every time a public employee discovers alleged wrongdoing related to his job and brings it to the attention of law enforcement or other outside parties, the speech is unprotected. Mr. Thomas was not hired to detect fraud in connection with the issuance of certificates of occupancy; he was hired to inspect houses. Unlike Ceballos' recommendation not to pursue a case, which was part of his job and therefore subject to his employer's authority to evaluate and discipline, Garcetti, 547 U.S. at 421-22, 126 S.Ct. 1951, Mr. Thomas's act went well beyond his official responsibilities. No one could say he was commissioned by the City to report suspected wrongdoing to the OSBI. The line between official and unofficial duties is drawn most helpfully in Casey v. West Las Vegas Independent School District, 473 F.3d 1323 (10th Cir.2007). Casey was the Chief Executive Officer of a Head Start program in Oklahoma. When she discovered that the Las Vegas School Board had been violating the Open Meetings Act, she warned the Board, and when the Board ignored her warnings, she complained in writing to the New Mexico Attorney General's office. We held that Casey was not acting within her job duties when she went to the Attorney General's office to report the Board's alleged violation of the Act. Id. at 1332. We distinguished this from another incident, in which Casey reported certain complaints about the administration of the Head Start program, also ignored by the Board, to federal Head Start officials. The Head Start program, we said, was committed to her care and ... she had independent responsibilities to the federal government to report fraud. Id. We believe that Mr. Thomas's decision to report what he believed to be illegal activity relating to the falsely completed building certificate to the OSBI is akin to Casey's decision to take her grievance to the New Mexico Attorney General when she ... lost faith that the Board would listen to her advice about the Open Meetings Act. Id. Mr. Thomas was not satisfied that Mr. Edwards or Mr. Ketchum would report the fraud to the authorities, so he took his grievance elsewherethat is, to the OSBI. It was when Casey went beyond her supervisors and reported to someone outside her chain of command about a matter which was not committed to her care that we found that her speech was protected by the First Amendment. Id. So too, when Mr. Thomas went beyond complaining to his supervisors and instead threatened to report to the OSBI, an agency outside his chain of command, his speech ceased to be merely `pursuant to his official duties' and became the speech of a concerned citizen. [1] The fact that Mr. Thomas threatened to go outside his usual chain of command and report on suspected criminal activity to the OSBI, and not merely to his supervisors or to the state housing inspector, leads us to believe that he was not acting pursuant to his official duties. Threatening to report fraudulent certificates to law enforcement officials was not the type of activity Mr. Thomas was paid to do. See Green, 472 F.3d at 801; cf. Hesse v. Jackson, 541 F.3d 1240, 1250 (10th Cir.2008) (holding that a plaintiff's conversations with an administrator were pursuant to his official duties because they occurr[ed] for the purpose of addressing administrative issues and [were] directed to the contractually appropriate party). Mr. Thomas was paid to inspect houses, and while informing Mr. Ketchum of a fraudulent certificate would reasonably have been pursuant to those duties, going outside his normal supervisors and inaugurating a criminal probe would seem not to be. Following Casey, we must further consider whether Mr. Thomas had an underlying legal obligation, arising from his official position, to report the suspected wrongdoing. In Casey, the plaintiff would have been subject to civil and criminal liability by remaining silent in the face of her knowledge that fraud in the administration of Head Start had occurred. Casey, 473 F.3d at 1330. We viewed this as relevant to determining whether reporting that fraud was pursuant to her official duties. Id. at 1330-31. According to his response to Mr. Sacchieri's motion for summary judgement, Mr. Thomas believed that if he did not report the fraud, he would be criminally liable. The district court relied on this ground in its grant of summary judgment for the defendants, stating that [Mr. Thomas] believed he was obligated to report what he perceived, based on his knowledge and the conduct of his job, to be improper or unlawful activity. Oklahoma law provides that [a]ny clerk, register or other officer having the custody of any record who permits that record to be alter[ed] or falsifi[ed] is subject to criminal liability. 21 Okl. St. § 461. Although Mr. Thomas never had custody of the allegedly fraudulent certificate, his silence upon having seen it might be construed as permission for the certificate to be issued. Had he let the certificate go through with his tacit approval, it is possible that he might have been subject to criminal liability. See 21 Okl. St. § 462. But Mr. Thomas's liability can be distinguished from Ms. Casey's. Casey was liable under federal statute as the director of a federally funded program, and she was the person primarily responsible for the program being free of fraud. Casey, 473 F.3d at 1330. There was a close relationship between the authority who issued the regulations, the content of those regulations, and the scope of Casey's professional responsibilities. Mr. Thomas was employed by the city, not by the state. And he was not given primary responsibility for ensuring that suspected fraudulent certificates were subject to criminal investigation or prosecution. More importantly, perhaps, it cannot be the case that a criminal liability statute aimed at every public official should somehow become part of every public official's job description. That would effectively make the obligation to report and seek the prosecution of fraud part of every employee's job. Mr. Thomas reported the certificate to Mr. Edwards, telling him it was not official. For this, he probably fulfilled his obligations under the state statute. To go beyond this, and to contact the law enforcement officials on his own, was beyond his professional responsibilities as a housing inspector. Moreover, having complained about the premature certificate to Mr. Edwards and having procured its destruction, Mr. Thomas was under no danger of legal liability for permitting the falsification of the certificate. Unlike Casey, who had to report to federal authorities to stop an ongoing fraud, which had not stopped when she complained to her immediate supervisors, Mr. Thomas's demand that the certificate be destroyed had already been satisfied. Exercising de novo review of the legal question whether Mr. Thomas's speech was constitutionally protected, we therefore conclude that it was.