Show Notes - Gonzalez v. Trevino Primer

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Description

Episode #81

Today on Legalese, we are discussing Gonzalez v. Trevino.

The petitioner in the case is Sylvia Gonzalez, a 76-year-old grandmother from Castle Hills, Texas.  Sylvia ran for the local city council on a non-partisan platform of fixing potholes and the like. She and many of her constituents believed that the mayor and city manager were ignoring their frustrations with the city. The mayor and other allies of the city manager didn’t take kindly to the criticism and concocted a plan to punish Sylvia for falling out of line. 

When her first city council meeting ended, Sylvia—who sat next to the mayor—gathered up her papers from the table and placed them in a binder. In doing so, she accidentally gathered up the petition along with them, an error that was discovered and corrected within minutes. The petition never even left the city council table.

Two months later, for having temporarily mislaid the petition, the mayor and police chief used bogus novel charges filed by a friend and local attorney dubbed a “special detective” under a broadly written law to have Sylvia arrested, booked, and thrown in jail—even though she had done nothing wrong. 

Although this case arises from a qualified immunity appeal, the issue of qualified immunity is not directly before the Supreme Court. Rather, the Court will decide whether and, if so, how a victim of retaliatory arrest can bring or prove a First Amendment claim and hold government officials accountable for their misconduct. 

Specifically, the Supreme Court will consider two questions:

1. “Whether the Nieves probable cause exception can be satisfied by objective evidence other than specific examples of arrests that never happened.”
   
   Sylvia argues that she “meets [Nieves’] criteria for overcoming the existence of probable cause. Nieves requires only that plaintiffs point to ‘objective evidence’ that they were treated differently from non-critics, which is exactly what Sylvia did here. Limiting the objective evidence to specific instances of non-arrests under the same statute, as the Fifth Circuit’s ruling does, imposes artificial rigidity to this very important carve-out, making it impossible to satisfy.” 

2. “Whether the Nieves probable cause rule is limited to individual claims against arresting officers for split-second arrests.”
   
   Sylvia’s case, which was filed against the city officials and not any arresting officer, argues that Nievesis limited to police officers forced to make time-pressured, on-the-spot decisions to arrest someone. In her case, the city officials considered her case for two months before making an arrest. She argues that the Fifth Circuit “erred in applying Nieves … to ‘deliberative, intentional, and premeditated conspiracies to punish people for protected First Amendment activity,’” because the Nieves no-probable-cause rule shields only arresting officers reacting to potential crimes unfolding before them and making on-the-spot decisions to arrest. 

Sylvia’s case will determine whether local bureaucrats can easily punish their critics with retaliatory arrests. Today, state and federal criminal law books overflow with hundreds of thousands of potential crimes. If all that’s needed to punish a government critic is probable cause from any one of those innumerable offenses, the First Amendment will be greatly diminished. A mere pretextual crime will be all that’s needed. Fundamentally, Sylvia’s case answers a fundamental question that many in America take for granted: Can a person be arrested for criticizing the government?

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Links

No. 22-1025 Gonzalez v. Trevino

• Docket Page

• Question Presented

• Cert Petition

  • Cert Petition Appendix

• Oral Arguments

Lower Court Proceedings

• Gonzalez v. City of Castle Hills, Texas, et al., No. 5:20-CV-1151, W.D. Tex. (March 12, 2021)

  • Complaint For Retrospective Relief

• Gonzalez v. Trevino, et al., No. 21-50276, 5th Cir. (July 29, 2022)

• Gonzalez v. Trevino, et al., No. 21-50276, 5th Cir. (February 22, 2023) (denying rehearing en banc)

Related Cases

• Nieves v. Bartlett, 587 U.S. ___ (2019)

Institute For Justice

• Gonzalez v. Trevino —Castle Hill Retaliation Case

• Listeners’ Guide to Oral Arguments in Gonzalez v. Trevino

• Texas City Officials Think They Can Throw You in Jail for Criticizing Them (Documentary)

• A Grandma's Retaliatory Arrest: IJ Takes Her Fight to the Supreme Court (Interview with Sylvia Gonzalez and Patrick Jaicomo)

• After Being Arrested for Speaking Out, a Texas Woman Sues to Hold Gov. Officials Accountable (September 29, 2020)

• Donate to Sylvia Gonzalez’s Defense Fund at IJ.org

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