Qualified Immunity Blows A Hole In The First Amendment

The First Amendment protects many of our most cherished rights, including the right to petition the government. Sylvia Gonzalez did just that and the controversy over the petition she led landed the grandmother and city council member in a Texas jail. Now she’s asking the U.S. Supreme Court to let her fight for accountability to move forward.

Sylvia’s tale of political involvement sounds like a typical American story up to the moment when she was charged with a crime. Concerned that her city of Castle Hills, a suburb of San Antonio, wasn’t focusing on basic management issues like fixing streets, Sylvia ran against an incumbent council member. She knocked on doors and estimated that she met face-to-face with more than 500 Castle Hills families.

She narrowly won election and on her first day in office started collecting signatures on a non-binding petition to remove the city manager, who Sylvia and many residents blamed for the poor management. However, that manager was a close ally of both the mayor and other city officials, including the police chief. A resident submitted the petition during Sylvia’s first meeting sitting on the council.

That meeting dragged onto a second night and at the conclusion of the meeting Sylvia collected the papers around her, including the petition, and put them into her binder. She wandered away from the dais to talk with a constituent. A few minutes later, a police officer came over to Sylvia, interrupting the conversation to tell her that the mayor wanted to talk.

The mayor asked where the petition was and then prompted Sylvia to check her binder. Sylvia looked, found the petition and handed it over. This simple mix-up resulted in a two-month investigation. After the first officer on the case could not pin a crime on Sylvia, the police chief deputized an attorney friend to act as a “special detective.”

After another month, the special detective went around the local district attorney to directly order Sylvia’s arrest on a misdemeanor charge of tampering with a government record. She was going to be charged with a crime for trying to steal the very petition that she worked hard to put together.

Demonstrating just how much her political opponents wanted to punish Sylvia, the city obtained a warrant to ensure she would have to spend the day in jail. They then blasted her mug shot to the local media along with the baseless allegations of theft.

The scheme fell apart when the district attorney dropped the trumped-up charges. The whole situation brings to mind the notorious Soviet secret police leader Lavrentiy Beria’s boast, “Show me the man and I will show you the crime.” It’s the kind of thing that isn’t supposed to happen in America.

No one involved in the plot against Sylvia was charged with a crime and she was so traumatized by the incident that she decided to resign from the council. But she wasn’t done fighting. She sued her persecutors for violating her First Amendment rights.

And she won, at first. A federal district court ruled that the city officials were not entitled to qualified immunity. But Sylvia’s victory would prove short-lived. When government officials are denied qualified immunity by a district court, they can appeal that decision to a circuit court and even up to the U.S. Supreme Court. That often means years in court before a civil rights case is heard by a jury.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed saying that Sylvia had not been able to prove that the arrest was only done to retaliate against her, despite evidence that no one had been prosecuted for a similar action in the last decade in Texas. In a 2-1 decision, the judges relied on a previous case that was about police acting in a split-second decision. But again, Sylvia wasn’t arrested at the meeting, her opponents took months trying to figure out how to put her in jail.

Sylvia’s case demonstrates how qualified immunity protects government officials who are especially creative in violating constitutional rights. What happened in Castle Hills was a grave offense against democracy and political participation. When city officials lose at the ballot box, they shouldn’t be able to use their power to harass opponents out of office. The First Amendment’s guarantees are worthless if citizens can’t hold officials accountable. The Supreme Court should put Sylvia’s fight for her rights back on track.