Court Opinion

ID: 9471050
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:24:19.550323+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:42:15.288403
License: Public Domain

JAMES F. GORDON, Senior District Judge,
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent from so much of the majority’s opinion as allows an employee to be suspended, indefinitely and without pay, simply on the basis of an indictment charging job-related offenses. Because such a practice is so unnecessary to protect governmental interests, and at the same time could so easily be abused, I would hold that the appellants’ due process rights were violated. Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U.S. 319 (1976).
I recognize that an agency may have valid interests at stake when one of its employees is indicted. The agency will want to maintain public confidence and assure that its functions are not hindered or undermined by the employee’s continued work. But the majority seems incorrect to me when they assert that “[t]he only alternative to allowing suspension on the basis of a job-related indictment is to require the agency to base the suspension on the employee’s allegedly unlawful conduct and to prove independently that the conduct actually occurred.” There are still other alternatives which are far less drastic than indefinite suspension. The employee can be assigned to another agency job that is less sensitive. Or, if such a job cannot be found, the employee can be placed on administrative leave which would allow the person to continue being paid while the person’s job status is in limbo.
I believe these alternatives should be obligatory because indefinite suspensions based solely on indictments are so dangerous. Indictments may be based on “probable cause” that a person committed a crime, but often — as with appellant Charest — they are not borne out. In the meantime, employees like these appellants may be cut off financially, without any realistic chance of being hired by another employer, and without any assurance that the indictment and subsequent investigation will not go on for years. Perhaps worst of all, the employees may be thrown into this limbo because of unreliable or politically motivated evidence which the employees may not know or be able to discover and refute.
The majority plainly is trying to address the most unfair aspects of this situation when it interprets the Back Pay Act as requiring that a reinstated employee be reimbursed for his lost wages, contrary to Jankowitz v. United States, 533 F.2d 538 (Ct.Cl.1976). While I concur with that result, it is difficult to accept the majority’s rationale that Charest’s suspension was lawful in 1979, but “unjustified or unwarranted” once he was acquitted several years later. Instead, I would hold that both Brown and Charest were entitled to pay so long as they could not be legally discharged. The truth is, what the agency here called an “indefinite suspension,” others might more candidly call a “conditional discharge.”