By: Loyd Willaford Clive Pontusson
In Billioni v. Bryant, the U.S. Court of Appeals found that a trial court had applied an incorrect legal standard to an Officer’s claim that his First Amendment right to free speech had been violated. Billioni was an employee of the York County Detention Center who discussed video footage of the alleged beating of a detainee with the press. When he was fired for doing so, he filed a lawsuit claiming he had a right under the First Amendment to bring this information to the public. This raised complex legal issues, and the U.S. Court of Appeals issued a narrow ruling regarding the test for when a government employee may share confidential information that may be of concern to the public. Billioni’s lawsuit will therefore continue in a lower court.
Michael Billioni was a Master Control Specialist in the York County Detention Center. He had regular access to security camera footage inside the Detention Center. After hearing a public information officer deny that officers had done anything wrong when an inmate died shortly after other officers restrained the inmate, Billioni decided to review the video of the incident. Billoni was concerned by what he saw in the video: other Officers had repeatedly punched and tasered the inmate. Billioni’s wife worked for a local news station. Billioni told his wife about the video. Reporters who worked with Billoni’s wife later obtained the video via a public information request. When the Sheriff’s Department found out about this, they investigated Billioni. He admitted to discussing the surveillance footage with his wife. The Sheriff fired him.
Billioni filed a lawsuit against the Sheriff’s Department, alleging that he was fired in retaliation for exercising his right to free speech under the First Amendment. While public employees have limited rights to free speech with regard to confidential government information, they are allowed to share information if it is of concern to the public. Billioni argued that by discussing the video footage of the incident, he was attempting to alert the public to very serious misconduct occurring in the Detention Center. This was especially true because the Sheriff’s Office had previously stated that no misconduct had occurred related to this inmate’s death. Billioni argued that the public interest in bringing this misconduct to light outweighed any interest the Sheriff might have in not disrupting operations at the Detention Center.
Sheriff Bryant argued that he was entitled to qualified immunity—a legal doctrine that states government officials cannot be sued for actions they take in their “official capacity.” This makes them immune from a lawsuit unless it is shown that they violated a clearly established law or constitutional principle. Therefore, the Sheriff argued that there was no clearly established law that said Billioni’s right to share information with the public outweighed the Sheriff’s responsibility to keep the Detention center running smoothly.
Billioni and the Sheriff’s Department agreed a balancing test had to be applied, but clearly disagreed about which way the balance tipped. However, the Court of Appeals found that the lower court had not been quite correct in its application of the balancing test between Billioni’s right to free speech and the disruption it would cause to the Sheriff’s office. The lower court had applied a rule that Billioni’s right to speak out on a matter of public concern had to be weighed against the actual disruption it caused. However, the Court of Appeals found that this was incorrect. It said:
Courts do not require the public employer to prove that the employee’s speech actually disrupted efficiency, but only that an adverse effect was reasonably to be apprehended.
In plainer English, this meant that the Sheriff’s department did not need to produce evidence that Billioni’s speech was actually disruptive—the indication that it could be is enough. The Court of Appeals did not decide whether Billioni’s speech was protected under this balancing test, and instead sent the case back to the lower court so the legal test could be applied in the correct way. Billioni’s lawsuit will continue.
This case is a classic whistleblower first amendment case. In these cases, the right of the person speaking has to be weighed against the right of the public institution “to avoid disruption of its internal operations.” The Court had no trouble deciding that Billoni was speaking as citizen on a matter of public concern when he shared about the video with his wife, a member of the public who also happened to work for a news organization. However, the court ruled that the lower court had applied too harsh a standard to the Sheriff when it ruled that the Sheriff had not shown an “actual disruption of operations,” and thus Billoni’s speech was protected. The appellate court held that the Sheriff only needed to show “a reasonable apprehension of disruption” to outweigh Billoni’s free speech rights. The appellate court sent the case back to the trial court to determine whether the Sheriff had a “reasonable apprehension of disruption” which outweighed Belloni’s right to discuss a video showing potential abuse of an inmate.
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