A Texas woman who was detained after criticizing a high-ranking official while serving on a small-town council had her civil rights claim resurrected by the Supreme Court on Thursday.
Sylvia Gonzalez will now have a another opportunity to file a retaliation claim when the court, by an 8-1 vote, returns the case to a lower court for additional proceedings.
“No one should have to go through what I went through, and with this decision, I’m confident it won’t happen again,” Gonzalez stated.
The case concerned the application of a 2019 Supreme Court decision known as Nieves v. Bartlett, which held that plaintiffs are typically not permitted to file retaliation claims when police make legitimate arrests.
Gonzalez, 72 at the time, was brought into custody in 2019 not long after becoming a member of the Castle Hills, Texas, council. She had challenged the city manager in her election campaign.
Gonzalez was accused of deleting a government document—a citizen petition that she had drafted—inappropriately.
The paperwork was jumbled up with her other papers, she claimed, and she had not intended to take it.
Gonzalez, who has no prior criminal history, was only jailed for one day before the charges were subsequently withdrawn. She resigned from her elected post as well.
Gonzalez filed a lawsuit, claiming that her concerns about Ryan Rapelye, the municipal manager, were met with reprisal when she was arrested. She said that officials had disregarded the First Amendment of the Constitution, which guarantees the freedom to free speech.
Defendants included Castle Hills Mayor Edward Trevino, former Police Chief John Siemens, and attorney Alex Wright, who was hired to help with the investigation.
In the Supreme Court decision, Gonzalez’s attempt to get over a procedural impediment to her complaint was at stake.
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Gonzalez should be entitled to pursue her claim under the 2019 Supreme Court decision Nieves v. Bartlett, according to her attorneys at the Institute for Justice, a libertarian legal organization.
The decision said that plaintiffs often cannot file retaliation claims when police have reasonable suspicion to initiate an arrest.
The court did note, however, that even in cases where there was probable cause and plaintiffs can demonstrate that other people in like circumstances had not been arrested, cases may still proceed in certain circumstances.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, located in New Orleans, was criticized by the Supreme Court in its unsigned decision on Thursday for the way it determined whether Gonzalez could pursue her lawsuit.
The Supreme Court decided that the lower court erroneously believed she needed to present a “very specific comparator” to demonstrate that others had engaged in the same behavior but had not been arrested.
Gonzalez’s evidence that “no one has ever been arrested for engaging in a certain kind of conduct” may be sufficient, the court stated, to support her claim.
The lone dissenter, Justice Clarence Thomas, said that Gonzalez’s admission that there was probable cause for the police to arrest her should indicate that her lawsuit should not proceed.
