Court Opinion

ID: 9569975
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 20:19:06.321873+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:04:28.991429
License: Public Domain

WARREN, P. J.,
specially concurring.
I agree that we need to reconsider this case and that the majority’s result is correct. I think that a report about unethical agency action or sexual harassment is a matter of public concern. However, I do not agree with the majority’s method of determining whether plaintiffs statements were about unethical behavior or sexual harassment.
Plaintiffs claim against his employer, Klamath County, is that it is liable under 42 USC § 1983 for violating his First Amendment rights by terminating his employment *249because he spoke out about his supervisor’s policy relating to caterers and an incident involving a student nurse. We must keep that claim clearly in mind and not be drawn away from the gravamen of the complaint to an analysis of whether, in fact, defendants’ conduct was either unethical or legally actionable as sexual harassment. That is not the point.
The issue in these civil rights cases is not whether the public employer has engaged in the conduct of which plaintiff complained or whether that conduct, if it occurred, actually constitutes wrongdoing or could result in legal liability. The issue is the public employer’s suppression of its employee’s right to participate in public affairs. A public employer may not, through threat of discharge, prevent or chill its employees’ free expression of ideas, whether those ideas are right or wrong, true or false. It is the freedom to speak, even if the speech is false or mistaken, that is protected.1 See, e.g., New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 US 254, 84 S Ct 710, 11 L Ed 2d 686 (1964). “[C]itizens are not deprived of [those] fundamental rights by virtue of working for the government * * Connick v. Myers, 461 US 138, 147, 103 S Ct 1684, 75 L Ed 2d 708 (1983).
The focus is on what plaintiff said, not on the conduct that he was reporting. See Wren v. Spurlock, 798 F2d 1313, 1317 n 1 (10th Cir 1986), cert den 479 US 1085 (1987). In determining whether that speech addresses a matter of public concern, we look at the “content, form, and context of a given statement * * Connick v. Myers, supra, 461 US at 147. That requires consideration of all of the circumstances in which the statement was made, which includes “plaintiffs motives in making the statements, as well as the subject matter of the statements.” 105 Or App at 218. (Citations omitted.) Although
“an expression may inherently deal with a matter of public concern, the Connick test requires us to look at the point of the speech in question: Was it the employee’s point to bring wrongdoing to light? Or to raise issues of public concern, *250because they are of public concern? Or was the point to further some purely private interest?” Hesse v. Board of Education, 848 F2d 748, 752 (7th Cir 1988), cert den 489 US 1015 (1989).
Accord Roth v. Veteran’s Admin. of Government of U.S., 856 F2d 1401, 1405 (9th Cir 1988).
Even accepting for the sake of analysis that the topic of plaintiffs speech relates to matters that are of public interest, the other circumstances indicate that the point of his report was not to speak as a citizen about actual or potential wrongdoing or to address issues that are of public interest because they are of public concern. As the Supreme Court explained, a statement “not otherwise of public concern does not attain that status because its subject matter could, in different circumstances, have been the topic of a communication to the public that might be of general interest.” Connick v. Myers, supra, 461 US at 148 n 8.
The circumstances in this case indicate that, although plaintiffs complaint was not purely personal, in the sense that the supervisor’s conduct affected the entire office, neither did it rise to the level of a report about a matter of public concern. Plaintiff was engaged in an ongoing dispute with his supervisor about the supervisor’s management style, policies and professionalism. Plaintiff spoke to the county commissioner about the policy relating to catering and the student nurse incident as the last resort, to bring attention to what he felt were the supervisor’s shortcomings. He related examples of what he viewed to be unethical and improper policies and instances of unprofessional behavior. Because, under all of the circumstances, plaintiffs statement to the county commissioner was directed to a matter of internal office conditions and was not made as a citizen on a matter of public interest, the speech was not about a matter of public concern.
The problem with the majority’s analysis is that it concentrates on the conduct that plaintiff reported, rather than on plaintiff’s speech. As a result, it erroneously addresses whether the policy relating to caterers is indeed unethical or whether the student nurse incident could legally constitute sexual harassment. See 109 Or App 244, 245-46. The focus in First Amendment cases must be on the “content, *251form and context” of the speech, not on whether the conduct complained of actually occurred or, if it did, whether it constitutes the misconduct that plaintiff says that it does.
The majority’s analysis is at odds with Connick v. Myers, supra, and other cases dealing with public employees’ free speech rights. In Connick, for example, the Supreme Court recognized that the employee’s speech “touched upon a matter of public concern” when it was merely the asking of a question: Were fellow employees being pressured by their public employer to work on political campaigns for candidates supported by the office? The Court recognized that that issue, regardless of the answer to the question, “is a matter of interest to the community upon which it is essential that public employees be able to speak out freely without fear of retaliatory dismissal.” 461 US at 149. Similarly, in Pickering v. Board of Education, 391 US 563, 88 S Ct 1731, 20 L Ed 2d 811 (1968), the Court concluded that a teacher’s statements to the press about the school board’s allocation of resources, although false, raised issues that were a matter of public concern.
If an employee is discharged from public employment for reporting what the employee believes is racial discrimination by the employer, the majority apparently would hold that that discharge is not a violation of the employee’s right to speak freely, unless in fact the alleged conduct complained of would constitute actionable misconduct. However, in Givhan v. Western Line Consol. School Dist., 439 US 410, 99 S Ct 693, 58 L Ed 2d 619 (1979), the plaintiff alleged that the employer had engaged in racial discrimination. In saying that that allegation was about a matter of public concern, the Court did not consider its truth or falsity or whether the employer could be held civilly liable for it. See Connick v. Myers, supra, 461 US at 146.
The majority says that a public employee’s speech cannot be about a matter of public concern unless the employee is legally correct that the conduct that is the subject of the speech is actually wrongful.2 Because that would chill *252an employee’s First Amendment freedom to speak, I cannot join in its analysis. Accordingly, I concur only in the result.

 I do not deal here with what protection, if any, an employee might have if the speech were recklessly or intentionally false, if the employee had mixed motives for making the statements or if the employer’s need for efficiency in providing services for the public outweighs the employee’s interests. Those questions are not at issue here.

 Although the majority says that it does “not hold that a report * * * about the possibility of sexual harassment must be legally correct before the report is protected speech,” 109 Or App at 248, that assertion is inconsistent with the majority’s analysis of the case, which tests the conduct complained of against the legal standard *252for sexual harassment. It is difficult to understand the reason for that analysis, if it is not relevant to the majority’s decision. Further, although the majority misreads my concurrence as relying solely on plaintiffs motivation and then chides me for it, the majority, too, considers relevant plaintiffs motive for making the report:
“Plaintiff related the incident to the commissioner, not because he thought it was sexual harassment, but because he believed that Baggett’s conduct was an example of unprofessional behavior.
“No First Amendment protection is afforded speech intended to further a private interest that relates to internal administrative matters.” 109 Or App at 247. (Citation omitted.)
The majority ends up considering the same circumstances as I would in concluding that plaintiffs speech is not protected. The only point about which we really disagree is the majority’s initial step of testing the conduct that is the subject of the speech against the legal standard for wrongfulness. That step is wrong and an improper restriction on employees’ First Amendment rights.