Heffernan v. City of Paterson
Jeffrey Heffernan picked up a lawn sign for the candidate challenging the city’s incumbent mayor in the 2005 election. After other officers saw him with the sign, they told senior officers, including the police chief, who strongly supported the mayor. For his apparent public support of the other candidate, they demoted him to beat patrol work as a uniformed officer.
About Heffernan v. City of Paterson in brief
Jeffrey Heffernan, a detective with the Paterson, New Jersey police force, picked up a lawn sign for the candidate challenging the city’s incumbent mayor in the 2005 election. After other officers saw him with the sign, they told senior officers, including the police chief, who strongly supported the mayor. For his apparent public support of the other candidate, they demoted him to beat patrol work as a uniformed officer. The case took a decade to reach the Supreme Court, where it was heard by three different judges. The First Amendment protects public employees from retaliation by their employer when speaking on matters of public concern, the court has held. The court has recognized that the government as employer has wider constitutional latitude in its decisions than thegovernment as sovereign, it has also said.. In Pickering v. Board of Education, the Court first articulated the right of public employees to be protected from dismissal for exercising their right to free speech. Eight years later, this protection from dismissal was extended to cover partisan political ideology and affiliation in Elrod v. Burns. In Connick v. Myers, the Court developed a framework in which a plaintiff must pass two elements: The first is the threshold that a claim must show that they were speaking on a matter of public interest. The second is that they must show the harm to workplace efficiency outweighs the harm caused by the right to speech. In Waters v. Churchill, the Court revolved around a nurse who was dismissed around what was said or what was actually said.
The Court has said that the question at issue is whether the employer said what it actually thought or what it thought was said, and not what it said it actually said about the case. The question is whether it was actually true that the employer thought the case was about free speech, or if it was about the employer’s view of what it really thought it was. The Supreme Court has held that it is unconstitutional for a government agency to discipline an employee for engaging in partisan political activity, as long as that activity is not disruptive to the agency’s operations. It is currently codified at 42 U.S. C. § 1983, and is now used as a method of checking abuse by state officials who infringe upon constitutionally protected rights. The ruling was handed down in 2016 by a 6–2 margin, with Justice Stephen Breyer writing the majority opinion. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a dissenting opinion in which he was joined by Justice Samuel Alito, but he agreed that HeffERNan had been harmed, but his constitutional rights had not been violated. The decision was overturned on appeal before being granted again in the third trial. It provided a remedy for those citizens who were deprived of their constitutional rights under the “color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia” and is currently used to check abuse of the government-as-employer framework in the court’s decisions.
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