Opinion ID: 205434
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Law Applicable to Qualified Immunity

Text: Since the issue of qualified immunity was not waived, we will proceed to address the merits. Generally, qualified immunity protects government agents from liability when their actions do not violate  `clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.'  Purvis v. Oest, 614 F.3d 713, 720 (7th Cir.2010) (quoting Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818, 102 S.Ct. 2727, 73 L.Ed.2d 396 (1982)). This involves two questions: (1) whether the facts, taken in the light most favorable to the plaintiff, show that the defendant violated a constitutional right; and (2) whether that constitutional right was clearly established at the time of the alleged violation. Wheeler v. Lawson, 539 F.3d 629, 639 (7th Cir.2008) (citing Saucier v. Katz, 533 U.S. 194, 201, 121 S.Ct. 2151, 150 L.Ed.2d 272 (2001)). Whether the defendants are entitled to qualified immunity will depend on what constitutional affronts the plaintiffs argue.
We have formulated the inquiry into a public employee's First Amendment rights as follows: To determine whether a public employee has a protected First Amendment right, we undertake a two part inquiry, known as the Connick-Pickering [ [10] ] test. First, the court must determine whether the plaintiff's speech addressed a matter of public concern. If it did, the court must then apply the Pickering balancing test to determine whether the interests of the [plaintiff] as a citizen in commenting upon the matters of public concern are outweighed by the interest of the state, as an employer, in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees. Coady v. Steil, 187 F.3d 727, 731 (7th Cir.1999) (internal citations omitted). If, on the other hand, a public employee's speech does not implicate a matter of public concern, the Pickering balancing test is not reached because the Constitution does not insulate [the employee's] communications from employer discipline. Garcetti v. Ceballos, 547 U.S. 410, 421, 126 S.Ct. 1951, 164 L.Ed.2d 689 (2006). In Spiegla v. Hull, 481 F.3d 961 (7th Cir.2007), we explained that Garcetti stands for the proposition that public employees speaking `pursuant to their official duties' are speaking as employees, not citizens, and thus are not protected by the First Amendment regardless of the content of their speech. Spiegla, 481 F.3d at 965. In all cases, we consider only the speech that resulted in the adverse action against the employee. We have stated that [t]he scope of our inquiry is defined by the number of instances in which the plaintiff has produced `specific, nonconclusory allegations' reasonably linking her speech to employer discipline. Wright v. Ill. Dep't of Children & Family Servs., 40 F.3d 1492, 1500 (7th Cir.1994) (citing O'Connor v. Chicago Transit Auth., 985 F.2d 1362, 1368-71 (7th Cir.1993)).
The second inquiry, see Saucier, 533 U.S. at 201, 121 S.Ct. 2151, is whether the constitutional standards at issue were clearly established at the time the alleged violation occurred. See Purvis, 614 F.3d at 720. The relevant, dispositive inquiry... is whether it would be clear to a reasonable officer that his conduct was unlawful in the situation he confronted. Saucier, 533 U.S. at 202, 121 S.Ct. 2151. Most of the defendants' arguments here in favor of qualified immunity are addressed to this latter part of the Saucier inquiry, in that they revolve around reasons why the defendants might have been objectively reasonable in investigating and sanctioning the plaintiffs following the jailbreak. This court has explicitly reserved the question whether government defendants per se avoid First Amendment § 1983 claims by demonstrating that they had probable cause. See Abrams v. Walker, 307 F.3d 650, 657 (7th Cir.2002), overruled on other grounds by Spiegla v. Hull, 371 F.3d 928, 941-42 (7th Cir.2004) ( Spiegla I ). So it would be fruitless to pursue probable cause as such. Nevertheless, it is clear that evidence of probable cause may act as highly valuable circumstantial evidence that the complained-of conduct would have occurred without a retaliatory motive. Hartman v. Moore, 547 U.S. 250, 261, 126 S.Ct. 1695, 164 L.Ed.2d 441 (2006). Therefore, facts which would be relevant to probable cause in a Fourth Amendment case will also be relevant to the reasonableness of the defendants' actions in a First Amendment case. See, e.g., Purtell v. Mason, 527 F.3d 615, 622, 626 (7th Cir.2008).