Sigsworth v. City of Aurora, Ill
| Decision Date | 25 May 2007 |
| Docket Number | No. 05-4143.,05-4143. |
| Parties | Martin SIGSWORTH, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. CITY OF AURORA, ILLINOIS, an Illinois municipal corporation, a body politic; David Stover, Mayor of the City of Aurora, Illinois, William J. Lawler, Chief of Police of Aurora, et al., Defendants-Appellees. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit |
John P. DeRose (argued), DeRose & Associates, Hinsdale, IL, for Plaintiff-Appellant.
Patricia Witowski Supergan, City of Aurora Law Department, Aurora, IL, John B. Murphey (argued), Rosenthal, Murphey, Coblentz & Janega, Chicago, IL, for Defendants-Appellees.
Before WOOD, EVANS, and WILLIAMS, Circuit Judges.
Martin Sigsworth, an investigator with the Aurora, Illinois Police Department, represented his agency on a multi-jurisdictional task force formed to investigate gang activity in and around the Aurora area. When key targets in a drug raid managed to evade arrest, Sigsworth suspected that they had been tipped off by some of the task force's members. Sigsworth reported his suspicions to his supervisors, and he claims that in retaliation for this speech, he was removed from the task force and passed over for promotions. Sigsworth filed suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against the City of Aurora, its mayor, and various supervisory officers in the Aurora Police Department alleging violations of his First Amendment rights. He appeals the district court's dismissal of his first amended complaint. We affirm, finding that Sigsworth's speech was not made outside of his capacity as an investigator and a task force member, so he was not speaking as a citizen for First Amendment purposes. Sigsworth also objects to the district court's denial of his motions for leave to file a second amended complaint that were brought pursuant to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 59(e) and 15(a). However, we cannot conclude that the district court abused its discretion because there were no manifest errors of law or newly discovered evidence that merited consideration, and amendments to his complaint would have been futile since his speech was made as a public employee and not as a citizen.
The following allegations are taken from the first amended complaint. Martin Sigsworth joined the Aurora Police Department in 1992. In 1998, while employed as a detective in the Investigations Division, he began working with various federal agencies on a task force focused on increasing cooperation among law enforcement agencies to combat gang and drug activity in the Aurora area. In 2002, the task force obtained numerous arrest warrants for suspected drug dealers and gang members and planned to conduct a large-scale operation to execute the warrants. According to Sigsworth, the day before the planned arrests, some of the task force's members "acted in a manner so as to provide general and specific notice of the impending raid." Because of the "improper notice," several of the targeted suspects were able to evade arrest.
After the botched raid, Sigsworth reported to his supervisors what he believed to be misconduct by the task force members which hampered execution of some of the warrants. The policy of cooperation among the organizations participating in the task force and other policies of the Aurora Police Department prompted him to complain of the procedural missteps of his task force colleagues. Defendant Chief of Police William Lawler, one of Sigsworth's supervisors, instructed him to remain silent about the circumstances surrounding the raid. A short time later, Sigsworth was removed from the task force and the associated investigation. Moreover, despite his rank at the top of the list of eligible candidates, Sigsworth was denied promotions to sergeant.
On June 16, 2005, Sigsworth filed his first amended complaint against the City of Aurora, the mayor, and various officials in the Aurora Police Department claiming that the defendants deprived him of his right to free speech under the First Amendment by retaliating against him for reporting the alleged misconduct.1 The defendants filed a motion to dismiss, which the district court granted after finding that Sigsworth's communications were not spoken as a citizen on a matter of public concern and, therefore, not entitled to protection under the First Amendment. Sigsworth's motions to file a second amended complaint were also denied, and he now appeals.
We review de novo the district court's dismissal of Sigsworth's first amended complaint. See Chi. Dist. Council of Carpenters Welfare Fund v. Caremark, Inc., 474 F.3d 463, 471 (7th Cir. 2007). In doing so, we accept as true all well-pleaded factual allegations in the first amended complaint and construe all reasonable inferences from those facts in favor of Sigsworth. See id.
The First Amendment protects a public employee's right to speak as a citizen about matters of public concern under certain circumstances. See Garcetti v. Ceballos, ___ U.S. ___, ___, 126 S.Ct. 1951, 1957, 164 L.Ed.2d 689 (2006); Connick v Myers, 461 U.S. 138, 147-48, 103 S.Ct. 1684, 75 L.Ed.2d 708 (1983); Pickering v. Bd. of Educ., 391 U.S. 563, 568, 88 S.Ct. 1731, 20 L.Ed.2d 811 (1968). In such circumstances, an employer may not retaliate against an employee for engaging in protected speech. Massey v. Johnson, 457 F.3d 711, 716 (7th Cir.2006). To ensure that public employee speech is afforded the proper constitutional protections, we have traditionally applied the balancing test first announced in Pickering v. Board of Education and clarified in Connick v. Myers and other subsequent cases. See, e.g., Schad v. Jones, 415 F.3d 671, 674 (7th Cir.2005); Cygan v. Wis. Dep't of Corr., 388 F.3d 1092, 1099 (7th Cir.2004). Under the Connick-Pickering test, a public employee can establish that his speech is constitutionally protected if (1) the employee spoke as a citizen on matters of public concern, and (2) the interest of the employee as a citizen in commenting upon matters of public concern outweighs the interest of the State as an employer in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees. See Schad, 415 F.3d at 674 (citing Connick, 461 U.S. at 147, 103 S.Ct. 1684; Pickering, 391 U.S. at 568, 88 S.Ct. 1731). Applying this test, the district court dismissed Sigsworth's First Amendment retaliation claims, concluding that Sigsworth did not speak on a matter of public concern because he failed to allege that he exceeded his normal duties when he disclosed the improper acts of the task force members to his supervisors. The district court determined that because Sigsworth could not satisfy the first requirement of the Connick-Pickering test, his speech was not entitled to constitutional protection.
The Supreme Court has since provided further guidance as to when a public employee speaks as a citizen for First Amendment purposes. In Garcetti v. Ceballos, the Court considered a First Amendment retaliation claim where the relevant speech was a memorandum from a deputy district attorney, Richard Ceballos, to his supervisors that raised concerns about misrepresentations contained in a search warrant affidavit and recommended dismissal of the case. 126 S.Ct. at 1959-60. Ceballos alleged that his employer acted in retaliation by reassigning him to a trial deputy position, transferring him to another courthouse, and denying him a promotion. Id. at 1956. The Court found that Ceballos did not speak as a citizen, recognizing as the controlling factor in its determination that Ceballos's memorandum was written pursuant to his duties as a deputy district attorney. Id. at 1959. In light of this finding, the Court held that "when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline." Id. at 1960. The Court concluded that the deputy district attorney was not speaking as a citizen because he was merely discharging his professional responsibilities when writing his recommendation memorandum. Id.
With Garcetti in mind, we turn to Sigsworth's claims of First Amendment retaliation. The thrust of Sigsworth's argument on appeal is that he sufficiently alleged First Amendment retaliation because his speech "constituted matters of the utmost concern to the public." However, Garcetti requires that before analyzing whether an employee's speech is of public concern, a court must determine whether the employee was speaking "as a citizen" or, by contrast, pursuant to his duties as a public employee. 126 S.Ct. at 1960.2 We therefore engage in the balancing of public and private interests under Pickering and its progeny "[o]nly when government penalizes speech that a plaintiff utters `as a citizen'. . . ." Mills, 452 F.3d at 647-48. As we explain more fully below, Sigsworth was not speaking as a citizen when he reported to his supervisors his suspicions of misconduct by his colleagues.
Sigsworth claims that the report he made to his supervisors is deserving of First Amendment protection because his speech exceeded the scope of his official duties. Sigsworth relies on one of our pre-Garcetti cases, Delgado v. Jones, 282 F.3d 511, 516-20 (7th Cir.2002), where we found that a detective's memorandum to his supervisors about suspected criminal activities involving a relative of an elected official with ties to the police chief was protected by the First Amendment. There, our decision turned on whether the detective's speech addressed a matter of public concern, which we determined by looking to the "content, form, and context" of the detective's memorandum. Id. at 516-17 (citing Connick, 461 U.S. at 147-48, 103 S.Ct. 1684). With respect to the content, we acknowledged that the detective's disclosures might have been consistent with his...
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