SCOTUSblog By Kalvis Golde 6/12/2023
Sylvia Gonzalez rode to victory in her 2019 race for city council in Castle Hill, Texas, on a promise to unseat the allegedly corrupt city manager through a petition. A Castle Hill resident presented that petition, as promised, to Mayor Edward Trevino at Gonzalez’s first council meeting. After the meeting, Gonzalez gathered the papers around her and stored them in a binder. Before Gonzalez left the room, Trevino asked her for the petition – which, to her surprise, she found in her binder.
Trevino initially downplayed Gonzalez’s discovery of the petition in her binder, remarking that she had “probably picked it up by mistake.” But soon after, Trevino instructed the city’s chief of police to investigate Gonzalez. After a two-month investigation, she was arrested for violating a Texas law that prohibits “intentionally destroy[ing], conceal[ing], remov[ing], or otherwise impair[ing] … a government record.” The district attorney quickly dropped the charges, but not before Gonzalez, who at the time was 72, had been processed and spent the day in jail. With her mugshot released to the local media, Gonzalez gave in and ultimately resigned from the city council.
Gonzalez sued Trevino, the police chief, and the special detective appointed to lead the investigation. Pointing to affidavit statements listing her stance against the city manager as the justification for a warrant, she argued that she was arrested in retaliation for conduct protected by her First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and petition.
Gonzalez did not dispute that police had probable cause to arrest her. Rather, she argued that she qualified for the exception outlined in Nieves by presenting data of indictments under the Texas tampering statute over the past decade. Virtually all of those indictments were for forging government IDs or tampering with financial records; none, Gonzalez explained, were “for conduct remotely like hers.”
More:
https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/06/outspoken-critic-on-texas-city-council-seeks-to-revive-lawsuit-over-retaliatory-arrest/
