Wednesday, February 09, 2000
Court finds politics not valid reason to fire jailer
Partisan retaliation argued in Tenn. case
BY BEN L. KAUFMAN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
A federal appellate court in Cincinnati on Tuesday sharpened public employee protections from partisan retaliation after elections.
The three-judge panel said jailer Wanda Sowards was fired while engaging in constitutionally protected activities: intimate and political associations with her husband.
What was unclear was whether she was fired because of those relationships.
If she was, her First Amendment rights were violated, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit said.
It sent the case back for a Knoxville, Tenn., jury to decide that question.
Tuesday's opinion was a loss for Loudon County, Tenn., and its sheriff.
They said the sheriff fired Mrs. Sowards in 1995 for failing to find an outstanding burglary warrant when the suspect was jailed on an unrelated charge.
However, the sheriff conceded he might have been more lenient if she'd supported his successful campaign rather than her husband's challenge in the 1994 GOP primary for sheriff.
Even so, the sheriff argued that he was immune from liability because the jailer's job was so politically sensitive that it was an exception to general First Amendment free speech and association guarantees.
In their unanimous ruling, Judges Karen Nelson Moore, Nathaniel R. Jones and Ronald Lee Gilman said her duties did not exempt her from those constitutional protections and the sheriff should have known it.
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