Justices Troubled By Their Earlier Ruling On Public Employee Speech Rights

A majority of the justices on the U.S. Supreme Court seemed disconcerted Monday by the consequences of one of the court's own rulings on the free speech rights of public employees.

Eight years ago, the conservative court majority, by a 5-4 vote, said public employees have no First Amendment protection for speech "pursuant to his official responsibilities." But Monday, in a case involving subpoenaed testimony in a criminal case, the court seemed headed in a different direction.

The case was brought by Edward Lane, an Alabama official who was fired after he testified truthfully that a state legislator was a ghost employee being paid by the taxpayers for no work.

Lane managed a program for at-risk juvenile offenders that was run out of Central Alabama Community College. After he was hired, he conducted an audit and found that one of the program's employees, a state legislator named Suzanne Schmitz, was a no-show employee in his department.

Lane says that people in his office warned him not to tangle with Schmitz because of her influence, but when she repeatedly refused to come to work, he fired her.

Soon after, he says, the FBI was investigating public corruption in Alabama, and Lane was subpoenaed to testify first before a grand jury, and later at Schmitz' two fraud trials. After Lane's first trial testimony, he was fired by the president of the community college, Steve Franks.

"He told me to clean out my office that day, like I had done something wrong," Lane recalled in an interview on the Supreme Court steps Monday. "When I got in my car, I was in tears. I felt no doubt that it was in retaliation" for testifying.

So Lane sued, contending his First Amendment right to free speech had been violated when he was fired for testifying. A federal appeals court ruled that under its own previous rulings, and under a 2006 Supreme Court decision, public employees have no free speech rights when they testify about information they learn on the job.

Lane appealed to the Supreme Court, and in oral arguments Monday the justices signaled that the lower court had gone too far.

Mark Waggoner, representing the former college president who fired Lane, repeatedly quoted back to the justices their own words from that 2006 decision, Garcetti v. Ceballos.

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Justices Troubled By Their Earlier Ruling On Public Employee Speech Rights