Ruffino v. Sheahan
| Decision Date | 27 June 2000 |
| Docket Number | No. 99-2981,99-2981 |
| Citation | 218 F.3d 697 |
| Parties | (7th Cir. 2000) Joseph RUFFINO, Randall A. Noble, and Emmett Doherty, Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. Michael SHEAHAN, individually and in his official capacity as Sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, Defendant-Appellant |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit |
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. Nos. 96 C 2234 & 97 C 5670--George W. Lindberg, Judge.
Before Easterbrook, Rovner, and Diane P. Wood, Circuit Judges.
This is an interlocutory appeal that never should have seen the light of day. For the most part, it presents questions over which this court has no appellate jurisdiction; the only other issue is one that was forfeited in the court below and that is without merit in any event. On the eve of trial, Michael Sheahan, the Sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, made a last-ditch effort to avoid final adjudication of the civil rights case that three sheriffs' deputies brought against him by taking an appeal from the district court's decision refusing to grant his motion for dismissal on qualified immunity grounds. The district court concluded that dismissal would be premature, because the resolution of the immunity issue depended upon disputed issues of fact. The Sheriff's attorneys convinced a panel of this court to stay the start of the trial while he attempted this appeal. On interlocutory appeal, we have enough of the record before us to conclude that the Sheriff not only cannot prevail on his immunity defense at this stage of the proceedings, but also that his arguments are so lacking in merit that he must show cause why he should not be sanctioned for filing this appeal.
The underlying action concerns the internal operations of the Sheriff's office. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the FBI was investigating corruption in that office. It learned that the Merit Board certification process, an examination regime through which deputy sheriffs were selected, was compromised, and perhaps as many as 300 people had been certified for employment even though they did not meet the necessary requirements.
In 1990, Sheriff Michael Sheahan, a Democrat, was elected to replace Sheriff James O'Grady, a Republican. Upon taking office, Sheahan promised to clean things up. His efforts to do so took on added urgency as the 1994 re-election campaign began in earnest. In August 1994, two months before the general election and after the FBI investigation had been underway for some time, Sheahan held a press conference and announced that he was bringing 30 deputies before the Merit Board to seek their dismissal. Sheahan claimed that he selected the 30 individuals based on their seniority, but the targets had a different explanation. They claimed that they had been singled out because of their support for O'Grady in the 1990 election, their support for the Republican Party in general, and their failure to contribute to the Democratic Party.
The Merit Board dismissed the 1994 complaints in July 1995, but the Sheriff pressed on, filing new charges before the Board in August 1995. The latter charges were dropped only in May 1998. Between the start of the first round of charges and the dismissal of the second, the 30 affected individuals were stripped of their rank, declared ineligible for overtime, barred from consideration for promotion, and denied weapons permits (which had the undesirable collateral effect of making it impossible for them to work lucrative private security jobs during their off-hours).
Among the group of 30 were the three plaintiffs in this case, Joseph Ruffino, Randall Noble, and Emmett Doherty. Each of these men held the title of "deputy sheriff." In that capacity, they worked as guards at various Cook County court facilities, where they performed services such as checking employee and attorney identification cards, operating scanning devices at the entrances to court facilities, and providing security in courtrooms and lock-up areas. They worked under an immediate supervisor located at the same facility. During the 1990 campaign, Ruffino and Doherty had both worked for O'Grady's re-election; Noble had posted O'Grady signs in his yard and put O'Grady bumper stickers on his car. In March 1994, just before the primary election, Noble appeared on television to discuss an allegation of bribery leveled at a high-ranking official in Sheriff Sheahan's administration--a matter Noble believed was being covered up. Noble also decided to run as a write-in candidate in the general election and to distribute anti-Sheahan literature.
On April 17, 1996, Ruffino and Noble responded to Sheahan's decision to bring them before the Merit Board by filing a five count complaint against him in both his individual and official capacities, alleging that he acted under color of law to deprive them of their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights, in violation of 42 U.S.C. sec. 1983, and alleging that he had violated certain state laws. On August 11, 1997, Doherty filed a complaint alleging only the federal civil rights violations similar to those that the other two had raised. In a series of rulings, the district court eliminated everything from the case except various claims against Sheahan in his official capacity and the First Amendment claims Ruffino, Noble, and Doherty are asserting against him in his individual capacity. The Sheriff moved for summary judgment on those claims, arguing that even if he did attempt to fire the three deputies for patronage reasons, his decision to do so was consistent with Illinois law and furthered the public's interest in rooting out corruption. He claimed that the deprivations the plaintiffs suffered were so trivial that they could not, as a matter of law, establish a constitutional violation. He also argued that he acted in good faith. At no time did he breathe a word before the district court hinting that his actions were at least debatably legitimate because the deputies in question were policymakers.
The district court decided first that it is not necessary for a First Amendment claim to show the kind of loss of a property interest that would support a Fourteenth Amendment claim, citing Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois, 497 U.S. 62, 73 (1990), and Swick v. City of Chicago, 11 F.3d 85, 87 (7th Cir. 1993). To the contrary, said the court, under Bart v. Telford, 677 F.2d 622, 625 (7th Cir. 1982), a campaign of harassment or disciplinary actions based on political affiliation can violate the First Amendment by chilling the exercise of the public employee's constitutional rights. Finding also that the facts concerning the way the 30 deputies were selected for termination proceedings were disputed, the court decided that dismissal on immunity grounds was inappropriate.
As the case reaches us, there are three potential issues on appeal: (1) whether the district court correctly rejected the Sheriff's qualified immunity claim for the official capacity counts; (2) whether the Sheriff may at this point attack the district court's qualified immunity decision on the ground that the deputies were all policymakers and thus subject to firing under a fair reading of the contemporaneous law; and (3) whether the district court's decision rejecting qualified immunity was correct. As we explain briefly below, we have no jurisdiction to consider the first or third of these issues, and the Sheriff has waived the second.
The doctrine of qualified immunity exists to protect public officials performing discretionary functions from civil damages. Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818 (1982). Official capacity suits do not, by definition, place the public official at risk of personal liability. Instead, they...
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