Court agrees to hear four cases
on Feb 28, 2005 at 10:23 am
The Supreme Court on Monday granted review of four cases, one on the free-speech rights of public employees, one on state taxes on gasoline sold by Indian tribes to their customers, and two on jurisdictional issues. The Court, once again, took no action on the dispute over the constitutionality of presidential appointments to federal judgeships during brief recesses of the Senate.
The new cases granted review are expected to be heard in October.
In the free speech case, Garcetti v. Ceballos (docket 04-473), the Court will define further the right of state and local government employees to First Amendment protection against retaliation when they speak out on issues of “public concern.†The lower courts have divided over the relationship between the topic the employee discusses and that individual’s work assignment.
The case involves a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles, Richard Ceballos, who sued his superiors, claiming that they demoted him and relocated him to punish him for protesting in an internal memorandum that a deputy sheriff had lied in an affidavit to support a search warrant in a pending case. The deputy ultimately shared the memo with defense lawyers, and testified at a hearing on a motion challenging the search warrant.
The supervising prosecutors obtained summary judgment in the District Court, on the theory that Ceballos had prepared his memo as part of his normal duties, not “as a citizen,” and thus his speech was not protected by the First Amendment. The Ninth Circuit overturned the summary judgment, declaring that a public employee’s work-related speech lacks constitutional protection only when the substance of the speech “would be of no relevance to the public’s evaluation of the performance of governmental agencies.” Former DA Gil Garcetti’s petition for review contends that this deepens a conflict among the Circuit Courts on the need to show that on-the-job expression was engaged in as citizen-speech.
In the tax case, Richards v. Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation (04-631), the Court faces the authority of states to impose a gasoline levy on distributors and importers, when the fuel is received outside of an Indian reservation but the fuel later is sold by a tribe to consumers. Thirteen states supported the appeal by Kansas taxing officials, arguing that the Tenth Circuit decision at issue undermined a “bright-line rule” permitting state taxation on non-Indians unless expressly barred by federal law.
In Lincoln Property Co. v. Roche (04-712), the Court will rule on the definition of “real party in interest†in deciding whether there is complete diversity among the parties so that a case may proceed in federal, not state, court. The case tests whether a party not named in the lawsuit can be considered a party in order to destroy complete diversity and thus nullify federal jurisdiction.
And, in Unitherm Food Systems v. Swift-Eckrich (04-597), the issue is whether a federal appeals court may review the sufficiency of evidence in a civil jury case where the party seeking to appeal had made a motion for judgment as a matter of law before the case went to the jury, but did not later renew that motion and did not move for a new trial. The Court rewrote the question it will be answering. The case grows out of an antitrust and patent dispute in the food processing industry. Swift-Eckrich is a ConAgra company.
The Court had again considered at its Friday Conference three appeals challenging President Bush’s recess appointment of Circuit Judge William H. Pryor, Jr., to the 11th Circuit. But, no action was taken on any of the three on Monday. The Court did act on one additional case that had challenged Pryor’s appointment — an appeal from the 11th Circuit by Gary Michael Senn (Senn v. U.S., 04-7175), but the judgment in that case was vacated for further review by the Circuit Court under U.S. v. Booker — the Sentencing Guidelines decision.
Continuing to return other federal Sentencing Guidelines cases to the lower courts for new reviews in the wake of Booker, the Court disposed of 38 additional petitions for review, in addition to Senn’s.
