Opinion ID: 2782925
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Element One: Employee Official Duties

Text: We must first determine whether Plaintiff’s testimony was protected speech. Garcetti holds that “when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline.” 547 U.S. at 421. The official-duties question is a practical one that turns on “whether the speech was commissioned by the employer,” Thomas v. City of Blanchard, 548 F.3d 1317, 1323 (10th Cir. 2008) (internal quotation marks omitted), and “reasonably contributes to or facilitates the employee’s performance of the official duty,” id. at 1324 (internal quotation marks omitted); see Green v. Bd. of Cnty. Comm’rs, 472 F.3d 794, 801 (10th Cir. 2007) (speech activities not protected because they “stemmed from and were the type of activities that [the employee] was paid to do”). The special case of employee testimony was recently addressed by the Supreme Court in Lane. Lane, the director of a youth program sponsored by a community college, had discovered that one of the program’s employees had been drawing a salary despite not reporting to work. See Lane, 134 S. Ct. at 2375. He fired the employee, then testified against her before a federal grand jury and at her federal public-corruption trials. See id. Thereafter, he was fired, allegedly because of his testimony against the employee. See id. at 2376. The Supreme Court reinstated Lane’s § 1983 suit against his employer, holding that “the First Amendment . . . protects a public employee who provided truthful sworn 16 testimony, compelled by subpoena, outside the course of his ordinary job responsibilities.” Id. at 2374–75. In general, said the Court, testimony is a duty performed as a citizen: Sworn testimony in judicial proceedings is a quintessential example of speech as a citizen for a simple reason: Anyone who testifies in court bears an obligation, to the court and society at large, to tell the truth. When the person testifying is a public employee, he may bear separate obligations to his employer—for example, an obligation not to show up to court dressed in an unprofessional manner. But any such obligations as an employee are distinct and independent from the obligation, as a citizen, to speak the truth. That independent obligation renders sworn testimony speech as a citizen and sets it apart from speech made purely in the capacity of an employee. Id. at 2379 (citations omitted). Moreover, the Supreme Court’s “precedents dating back to Pickering have recognized that speech by public employees on subject matter related to their employment holds special value precisely because those employees gain knowledge of matters of public concern through their employment.” Id. And that rationale is “especially evident” in a case like Lane. Id. at 2380. It involved “the very kind of speech necessary to prosecute corruption by public officials—speech by public employees regarding information learned through their employment.” Id. To refuse First Amendment protection under such circumstances “would place public employees who witness corruption in an impossible position, torn between the obligation to testify truthfully and the desire to avoid retaliation and keep their jobs.” Id. Nevertheless, the Court did not hold that all testimony is protected. It did not address “whether truthful sworn testimony would constitute citizen speech under Garcetti when given as part of a public employee’s ordinary job duties.” Id. at 2378 n.4; see also 17 id. at 2384 (Thomas, J., concurring) (“For some public employees—such as police officers, crime scene technicians, and laboratory analysts—testifying is a routine and critical part of their employment duties.”). Rather, the Court concluded: [T]he mere fact that a citizen’s speech concerns information acquired by virtue of his public employment does not transform that speech into employee—rather than citizen—speech. The critical question under Garcetti is whether the speech at issue is itself ordinarily within the scope of an employee’s duties, not whether it merely concerns those duties. Id. at 2379. Here, Plaintiff’s testimony was protected speech. It concerned his work but was not part of it. Although Defendants assert that testifying was a routine part of Plaintiff’s job as a reserve deputy, they cite no supporting evidence. And the testimony he gave at the Bowling trial was nothing like the routine testimony of law-enforcement agents in support of criminal prosecutions. Plaintiff testified for a private party, not his public employer; in a civil lawsuit, not a criminal prosecution; against law-enforcement entities, not for them; and in compliance with a subpoena, not an employer mandate. His testimony was not among “the type of activities that [he] was paid to do.” Green, 472 F.3d at 801; see Morales v. Jones, 494 F.3d 590, 598 (7th Cir. 2007) (“Being deposed in a civil suit pursuant to a subpoena was unquestionably not one of [police officer] Morales’ job duties because it was not part of what he was employed to do.”); see also id. at 603 (Rovner, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part) (“There is nothing in the record below to suggest that the deposition testimony was work that Lt. Morales was expected to perform as part of his formal or informal job duties, that it was conducted 18 pursuant to his job duties or at his employer’s behest, that it was work product of the police department, that it was official speech, or that it was one of the tasks he was paid to perform.”). Plaintiff has satisfied the first element of the Garcetti/Pickering test.