Appeals court rules against former Ranch Cordova Police chief, sharing racist text images not protected speech
The Ninth U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled against the former city of Rancho Cordova Police chief who filed suit against S...
https://www.elkgrovenews.net/2024/09/appeals-court-rules-against-former.html
The Ninth U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled against the former city of Rancho Cordova Police chief who filed suit against Sacramento County after she was forced out after she had shared racist images via text with fellow officers. The city of Rancho Cordova contracts with the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department for police services.
Former Rancho Cordova Police Chief Kate Adams reportedly shared racist images with fellow officers via text on New Year's Eve 2013. After her voluntary retirement in September 2021, Adams filed suit claiming then-Sheriff Scott Jones forced her out, and the racially offensive images she shared were not to promote or endorse them but rather a condemnation.
Adams alleged Jones forced her to either resign and keep the matter private or be fired and allow the information to go public. The images publicly surfaced months after Adams left the sheriff's department after 27 years of service, and she claims it damaged her reputation and employment prospects.
Adams claimed the forced resignation was retaliation after she requested an internal investigation of a sheriff's department captain. The same captain who was subjected to the investigation provided printouts of the 2013 texts.
At the U.S. District Court in Sacramento, Judge William Shubb ruled against Adams. Shubb dismissed the First Amendment claims that she failed to demonstrate that it was a matter of public concern, which would have protected it as speech.
In the ruling issued on Monday, the appeal court affirmed the lower court's finding that Adams' texts were not of public concern.
While the appeals court squashed the First Amendment argument, not all was lost for Adams. The majority ruling (one justice dissented) ending by saying "And, as we have noted, Adams has other causes of action that were not resolved by the district court. This interlocutory appeal only concerns her First Amendment retaliation and conspiracy claims. We, of course, express no view as to the other claims, which are not before us."
The complete ruling can be read here. Posted below is background description of the events taken from Monday's ruling that led to the lawsuit.
Kate Adams began working for the Sacramento County
Sheriff’s Office (“Department”) in 1994. She became Chief
of Police for the City of Rancho Cordova in March 2020. In
2021, she was forced to resign from that post over
allegations that she sent racist messages.
The messages in question were sent on New Year’s Eve
in 2013 when Adams was having “a friendly, casual text
message conversation” with her co-worker and then-friend,
Dan Morrissey. The two were exchanging New Year’s
wishes, and Adams sent videos of her children playing. At
some point in the exchange, Adams sent Morrissey a text
message stating, “Some rude racist just sent this!!” along
with two images she had received. The record does not
reveal who sent Adams the images or their motivation.
However, from context, it appears that Adams did not know
the senders. One of the images depicted a white man
spraying a young black child with a hose and contained a
superimposed offensive racial epithet. The other message
included an image of a comedian, with superimposed text containing an offensive racial slur. Morrissey responded,
“That’s not right.” Adams then replied in a message starting
with, “Oh, and just in case u [sic.] think I encourage this . . .”
However, the remainder of the text is not in the record. On
the same evening, Adams also texted the same images to
another co-worker and then-friend, LeeAnnDra Marchese,
although the record does not reflect if any messages were
sent with those transmittals.
Adams’s messages were not posted on social media, nor
otherwise made readily discoverable by the general public.
Neither message contains an intent to communicate the
images to the public, nor to transmit a comment on the
images to the general public. The record is clear that the
messages were intended for a purely private audience of
several friends in the context of private, social exchanges
during “a friendly, casual text message conversation.”
Seven years passed without further incident. However,
during that period, Adams’s friendships with Marchese and
Morrissey deteriorated. In 2015, Adams was promoted to
Assistant Chief of Police for the City of Rancho Cordova.
In 2019, Adams was informed of potential misconduct
on the part of Marchese. She forwarded the allegation to the
Department’s Internal Affairs Division. After Marchese
learned of Adams’s report, several anonymous misconduct
complaints were lodged against Adams—none of which
were found substantiated.
In July 2020, Adams filed a formal complaint of
harassment and retaliation against Marchese with the
County’s Equal Employment Opportunity office. During the
investigation, Marchese provided print-outs of the text
messages that Adams had forwarded in 2013, but did not
provide the surrounding text commentary from Adams. The Department commenced an investigation of Adams. During
the investigation, Morrissey provided his cell phone
showing the 2013 texts. The Department then gave Adams
a choice to either resign or be “terminated and publicly
mischaracterized as a racist.” An attorney for the County
told her that if she agreed to resign, the investigation would
never become public; however, if she refused to resign, “the
investigation would fuel a ‘media circus’” in which she
would be labeled a racist. She chose to resign in September
2021.
However, six months later, in March 2022, the President
of the Sacramento chapter of the NAACP published an open
letter stating that Adams had sent racially charged pictures
to other Sheriff’s Department employees; the letter
described the hose-spraying image and called for
accountability. The Sacramento Bee then published an
article repeating the open letter’s allegations. As a result,
Adams resigned from her longtime adjunct teaching position
at a local university, and two prospective employers ended
their consideration of her. She also claims anxiety, stress,
and depression were caused by the significant blows to her
professional career and personal reputation.
In August 2022, Adams filed suit against the County of
Sacramento, the Sheriff, and several Does, alleging claims
for (1) denial of procedural due process, (2) breach of
contract, (3) deprivation of the right to free speech under the
First Amendment, (4) First Amendment conspiracy,
(5) false light invasion of privacy, (6) false light conspiracy,
(7) intentional interference with prospective economic
advantage, and (8) intentional infliction of emotional
distress. The only causes of action at issue in this interlocutory appeal are Adams’s claim for violation of her
right to free speech under the First Amendment and her
derivative First Amendment conspiracy claim.
The district court granted the Defendants’ motion to
dismiss Adams’s first complaint for failure to state a claim,
but granted Adams leave to amend. After Adams amended
her complaint, the district court dismissed the First
Amendment claims with prejudice for failure to plead that
the text messages constituted speech “on a matter of public
concern.” The district court held that “sen[ding] racist
images, along with [Adams’s] disapproval of the images”—
as Adams described it—was not speech on a matter of public
concern because Adams “ma[de] no allegations that her
speech concerned either racism in her community or racism
in the police department.” In its initial dismissal, the court
recognized that Adams’s speech was not on a matter of
public concern “because the speech was intended to be
private and [did] not relate to the personnel or functioning of
the Department.”
Adams timely sought certification of the partial
dismissal order for interlocutory appeal, under 28 U.S.C.
§ 1292(b). Defendants did not oppose, and the district court
granted certification. A motions panel of our Court granted
Adams’s petition for permission to file this interlocutory
appeal.
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