Heffernan v. City of Paterson

''Heffernan v. City of Paterson'', 578 U.S. ___ (2016), was a United States Supreme Court case in 2016 concerning the First Amendment rights of public employees. By a 6–2 margin, the Court held that a public employee's constitutional rights might be violated when an employer, believing that the employee was engaging in what would be protected speech, disciplines them because of that belief, even if the employee did not exercise such a constitutional right.

The case was brought after Jeffrey Heffernan, a detective with the Paterson, New Jersey for the candidate challenging the city's incumbent mayor in the 2005 election (Heffernan's mother had wanted a sign, so he was getting one for her). While Heffernan did not support the challenger, after other officers saw him with the sign they told senior officers, including the police chief, who strongly supported the mayor. For his apparent public support of the other candidate, they demoted Heffernan to beat patrol work as a uniformed officer.

Heffernan brought suit alleging that his demotion violated his First Amendment rights. The case took a decade to reach the Supreme Court. For most of that time it was in federal district court, where it was heard by three different judges. A jury verdict in Heffernan's favor was set aside. A later summary judgment in the city's favor was overturned on appeal before being granted again in the third trial. Hereafter distinguished as ''Heffernan III''.

Writing for a majority of the Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Breyer stated that the department's belief was all that mattered, since the Court's precedent in this area holds it is unconstitutional for a government agency to discipline an employee (who does not work under a contract that explicitly permits such discipline) for engaging in partisan political activity, as long as that activity is not disruptive to the agency's operations. Even if Heffernan was not engaging in protected speech, he wrote, the discipline against him sent a message to others to avoid exercising their rights. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a dissenting opinion in which he was joined by Justice Samuel Alito, in which he agreed that Heffernan had been harmed, but his constitutional rights had not been violated.

Legal background

The First Amendment guarantees the rights of freedom of speech and peaceable assembly, among others. While not explicitly mentioned, the Supreme Court has held that the right to assembly includes the freedom of association, particularly political association. These protections not only prohibit the government from passing laws which infringe upon these rights, but also from taking actions which would violate them. While the Bill of Rights—which includes the First Amendment—applied originally only to the federal government, the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment allowed for the application of the Bill of Rights to the states under the incorporation doctrine.

In order to better protect these rights in the Reconstruction Era, Congress passed the Second Enforcement Act of 1871 at the request of President Ulysses S. Grant to better counter white supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan that were intimidating and suppressing voting by black citizens. The act provided a remedy for those citizens who were deprived of their constitutional rights under the "color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia" and is currently codified at 42 U.S.C. § 1983.42 U.S.C. § 1983. With its decision in '' Monroe v. Pape'' (1961), the Court expanded the reach of section 1983 such that it is now used as a method of checking abuse by state officials who infringe upon constitutionally protected rights.

The First Amendment protects public employees from retaliation by their employer when speaking on matters of public concern.. In '' Pickering v. Board of Education'' (1968), the Court first articulated the right of public employees to be protected from dismissal for exercising their right to free speech. There, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a teacher who was fired after writing a letter to a local newspaper critical of its handling of a recent bond issue.'' Pickering v. Board of Education,'' . Eight years later, this protection from dismissal was extended to cover partisan political ideology and affiliation in '' Elrod v. Burns''.

But the Court has recognized that the "government as employer" has wider constitutional latitude in its decisions than the "government as sovereign". In order to adequately delineate the limits of the government-as-employer's discretion, the Court developed a framework in '' Connick v. Myers'' (1983) known as the ''Connick'' test. It consists of two elements. The first is the threshold a plaintiff must pass to state a claim: the plaintiff must show that they were speaking on a matter of public concern. The second falls to the employer: they must show that the harm to workplace efficiency outweighs the harm caused by infringing upon the right to free speech.

In '' Waters v. Churchill'' (1994), the Court was faced with two differing accounts of the speech at issue. The question presented to the Court was whether the ''Connick'' test ought be applied to what the employer thought was said or what was actually said. The case revolved around a nurse dismissed for a conversation she had with a coworker. There was a discrepancy between what she argued was said and what her employer thought was said. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, joined by a plurality of justices, opined that the ''Connick'' test must be applied to the speech the employer thought occurred, and on which it acted, rather than that which the finder of fact determines did occur.

Prior history

Original dispute

In 2005, Jeffrey Heffernan was a detective with the Paterson, New Jersey

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