Griffin, Jr. v. Garrison

2011 DNH 008

• Court: District Court, D. New Hampshire
• Decided: January 13, 2011
• Docket: 09-CV-250-SM
• Status: Published

Opinion

Griffin, Jr. v . Garrison 09-CV-250-SM 1/13/11 UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT DISTRICT OF NEW HAMPSHIRE

John R. Griffin, Jr., Plaintiff

v. Case N o . 09-cv-250-SM Opinion N o . 2011 DNH 008 Margaret Garrison, Defendant

O R D E R

Pro se plaintiff, John R. Griffin, Jr., brings this action

seeking compensatory and punitive damages, claiming defendant, an

employee of the New Hampshire Department of Employment Security,

violated his First Amendment right to free speech. More

specifically, Griffin claims a constitutionally protected right

to receive state unemployment benefits - even if his private-

sector employment was terminated “for cause” - when that

termination was due to his having engaged in arguably “political”

speech. Pending before the court are plaintiff’s motion for

summary judgment (document n o . 44) and defendant’s cross-motion

for summary judgment (document n o . 4 7 ) . For the reasons set

forth below, plaintiff’s motion is denied and defendant’s motion

is granted. Standard of Review

When ruling on a motion for summary judgment, the court must

“view the entire record in the light most hospitable to the party

opposing summary judgment, indulging all reasonable inferences in

that party’s favor.” Griggs-Ryan v . Smith, 904 F.2d 112, 115

(1st Cir. 1990). Summary judgment is appropriate when the record

reveals “no genuine issue as to any material fact and . . . the

moving party is entitled to a judgment as a matter of law.” Fed.

R. Civ. P. 56(c). In this context, “a fact is ‘material’ if it

potentially affects the outcome of the suit and a dispute over it

is ‘genuine’ if the parties’ positions on the issue are supported

by conflicting evidence.” Int’l Ass’n of Machinists and

Aerospace Workers v . Winship Green Nursing Ctr., 103 F.3d 196,

199-200 (1st Cir. 1996) (citations omitted).

Background

Plaintiff was employed at Speare Memorial Hospital as a

radiology technician from May 3 0 , 2003, until May 1 9 , 2009, when

the hospital terminated his employment. He applied to the New

Hampshire Department of Employment Security (“DES”) for

unemployment benefits. Under New Hampshire law, however, a

person is not eligible for unemployment benefits if his or her

employment was terminated for “misconduct connected with his [or

her] work.” N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. (“RSA”) 282-A:32, I ( b ) . See

2 also Appeal of Riendeau, 152 N.H. 396, 398 (2005) (“New

Hampshire’s unemployment compensation system is predicated upon

benefits being paid to those who become unemployed through no

fault of their own.”). Accordingly, the DES sent the hospital a

“Notice of Claim,” seeking information about Griffin’s separation

from employment. In particular, the DES wanted to know the

reason(s) for Griffin’s discharge, details of any warnings that

had been issued to him, and an explanation of the company policy

(if any) that he had violated.

In response, the hospital informed DES that it fired Griffin

because he had an “inappropriate” conversation with a patient

about “politics and weapons,” and the patient had complained.

Plaintiff’s motion for summary judgment, Exhibit 2 (document n o .

44-3) at 2 . The patient apparently reported that Griffin “made a

remark about President Obama, Manchester being Obamaland, and

that he was stocking up on food, artillery, bullets and ammo in

case something happened.” Plaintiff’s Exhibit 5 (document n o .

44-6) at 1 . The “Notice of Corrective Action” prepared by the

hospital and signed by Griffin reveals that he had been

disciplined on six prior occasions, at least three of which

involved “unprofessional conduct” or “unprofessional

communication and workplace behavior.” Plaintiff’s Exhibit 1

(document n o . 4 4 - 2 ) . The narrative portion of that document was

3 completed by the director of the hospital’s radiology department,

Linda Nestor, and provides that:

I was notified via another hospital department about an issue regarding a conversation between [Griffin] and a patient. In my follow up investigation with the patient regarding the concern, the patient was upset due to remarks made that were inappropriate and related to politics and weapons. [Griffin] has had many verbal and written warnings in the past related to inappropriate/unprofessional comments that he has made. He has received two suspensions without pay for this behavior. This is a pattern of behavior that has gone on for almost 6 years and will not be tolerated any longer. As explicitly stated in his last written warning, the consequence of this action was termination of employment. [Griffin] has not been able to maintain this performance behavior, and therefore is terminated from employment effective immediately.

Id. (emphasis supplied).

A DES employee who is not party to this suit conducted the

investigation into the circumstances surrounding, and the cause

for, Griffin’s termination. Defendant, Margaret Garrison, then

reviewed that material and concluded that Griffin had been

“discharged on 5/19/09 from Speare Memorial Hospital Association

for reasons rising to the level of misconduct.” Plaintiff’s

Exhibit 3 (document n o . 44-4) at 2 . Accordingly, on July 1 5 ,

2009, she denied Griffin’s application for unemployment benefits.

Griffin appealed that denial to the New Hampshire Employment

Security Appeal Tribunal, which concluded that the hospital

failed to submit sufficient evidence to support a finding that

4 Griffin engaged in misconduct, reversed Garrison’s decision, and

awarded retroactive unemployment benefits beginning the first

week in June, 2009. Plaintiff’s Exhibit 5 (document n o . 44-6) at

3. Subsequently, despite having received the sought-after

unemployment benefits, Griffin filed this action.

Discussion

Griffin believes the hospital terminated his employment as a

consequence of his having engaged in protected “political speech”

(i.e., his comments about “Obamaland” and stocking up on food,

weapons, and ammunition). Plainly, he has no First Amendment

claim against the hospital, since it was not acting under color

of state law when it discharged him. See generally 42 U.S.C.

§ 1983. Accordingly, Griffin asserts a First Amendment claim

against M s . Garrison, claiming that her administrative conclusion

that he was discharged for reasons rising to the level of

“misconduct,” and her concomitant denial of his application for

benefits, effectively violated his First Amendment rights. Put

differently, Griffin asserts that because he was discharged for

having engaged in arguably protected political speech, he had a

constitutional right to receive state unemployment benefits - a

right he says Garrison violated. He seeks both compensatory and

punitive damages from Garrison, in her individual capacity.

5 It is unlikely that Griffin’s constitutional rights were

violated when his application for unemployment benefits was

initially denied. But, even if Garrison could be said to have

violated Griffin’s asserted right to unemployment benefits, she

would plainly be entitled to qualified immunity from suit under

§ 1983.

I. Griffin’s Constitutional Rights.

In allowing Griffin to proceed with his claims, the

magistrate judge (Muirhead, M.J.) noted that “Griffin’s case

resembles those arising under the Free Exercise Clause of the

First Amendment, involving employees terminated for religious

practices conflicting with a private employer’s policy but not

otherwise barred by law.” Report and Recommendation (document

no. 7 ) at 1 5 . That analogy is weak, however, and the referenced

line of Free Exercise Clause cases does not support Griffin’s

free speech claim.

Generally speaking, the Supreme Court opinions referenced by

the magistrate judge stand for the proposition that:

Where the state conditions receipt of an important benefit upon conduct proscribed by a religious faith, or where it denies such a benefit because of conduct mandated by religious belief, thereby putting substantial pressure on an adherent to modify his behavior and to violate his beliefs, a burden upon religion exists. While the compulsion may be indirect,

6 the infringement upon free exercise is nonetheless substantial.

Thomas v . Review Bd. of Indiana Employ’t Sec. Div., 450 U.S. 707,

717-18 (1981) (emphasis supplied). See also Hobbie v .

Unemployment Appeals Comm’n of Florida, 480 U.S. 136 (1987);

Sherbert v . Verner, 374 U.S. 398 (1963). Here, however, nothing

in the State’s statutory scheme governing unemployment benefits

conditioned receipt of those benefits upon conduct that would

have put “substantial pressure” on Griffin to “violate his

beliefs” about the President, the City of Manchester, or

firearms. Thomas, 450 U.S. at 718. Nor was his continued

employment at the hospital conditioned upon his forfeiting any

right guaranteed by law. Nor was he discharged for having

engaged in privileged or legally protected conduct mandated by

his political beliefs.

In short, even accepting the magistrate judge’s analogy for

discussion purposes, Griffin was not forced to choose between

adhering to his political beliefs (and, thereby, risk both

discharge and ineligibility for unemployment benefits), or

forsaking those political beliefs in order to obtain a public

benefit generally available to others. Rather, Griffin remained

absolutely free to maintain his political beliefs and he was free

to discuss them whenever he pleased, as long as he did not do so

7 during work hours, with patients - workplace conduct about which

his employer had warned him on several occasions.1

Accordingly, the court concludes that the Supreme Court’s

Free Exercise cases do not support Griffin’s claim that

defendant’s initial denial of his application for benefits

violated his First Amendment rights. And, if the reasoning

employed in those cases does not apply, it is difficult to

imagine how M s . Garrison’s initial denial of Griffin’s

application for benefits could have possibly violated his

constitutionally protected right of free speech.

II. M s . Garrison is Entitled to Qualified Immunity.

Even if her determination that Griffin was not eligible for

unemployment benefits did violate Griffin’s First Amendment

1 One might conceivably argue that the State’s statutory scheme had a “chilling effect” on Griffin’s First Amendment rights. But, as a private-sector employee, Griffin had no constitutionally protected right of free speech in his workplace. See, e.g., Hudgens v . NLRB, 424 U.S. 507, 513 (1976) (“It i s , of course, a commonplace that the constitutional guarantee of free speech is a guarantee only against abridgment by government, federal or state. Thus, while statutory or common law may in some situations extend protection or provide redress against a private corporation or person who seeks to abridge the free expression of others, no such protection or redress is provided by the Constitution itself.”) (citation omitted). Consequently, while the state statutory scheme may have indirectly counseled (or even pressured) Griffin not to engage in certain speech while at his private-sector job, he had no protected right to engage in such speech at his private workplace.

8 rights in some as yet undetermined way, Garrison is still

entitled to qualified immunity. A government official is

entitled to qualified immunity from personal liability if the

challenged “‘conduct [did] not violate clearly established

statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person

would have known.’” Aversa v . United States, 99 F.3d 1200, 1214

(1st Cir. 1996) (quoting Harlow v . Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818

(1982)). The challenged conduct is measured by an objective

standard of reasonableness, that i s : “Could an objectively

reasonable official, situated similarly to the defendant, have

believed that his conduct did not violate the plaintiff[’s]

constitutional rights, in light of clearly established law and

the information possessed by the defendant at the time of the

allegedly wrongful conduct?” Wood v . Clemons, 89 F.3d 922, 927

(1st Cir. 1996). As the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit

has observed,

To determine a defendant’s eligibility for qualified immunity, courts must define the right asserted by the plaintiff at an appropriate level of generality and ask whether, so characterized, that right was clearly established when the harm-inducing conduct allegedly took place. This does not mean that a right is clearly established only if there is precedent of considerable factual similarity. It does mean, however, that the law must have defined the right in a quite specific manner, and that the announcement of the rule establishing the right must have been unambiguous and widespread, such that the unlawfulness of particular conduct will be apparent ex ante to reasonable public officials.

9 Brady v . Dill, 187 F.3d 104, 115-16 (1st Cir. 1999) (citations

and internal quotation marks omitted) (emphasis supplied). As

suggested in Dill, a defendant does not lose the protection of

qualified immunity if she acts mistakenly, as long as her mistake

was objectively reasonable, as qualified immunity is intended to

protect “all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly

violate the law.” Malley v . Briggs, 475 U.S. 335, 341 (1986).

Typically, to resolve a government official’s claim of

qualified immunity, the court must make two inquiries: first,

whether the plaintiff has alleged a viable claim that his or her

constitutional rights were actually violated; and, second,

whether the right at issue was “clearly established” at the time

of the defendant’s alleged misconduct. See Saucier v . Katz, 533

U.S. 194, 201 (2001). Under Saucier, that two-step inquiry was

mandatory. Id. More recently, however, the Supreme Court has

relaxed the requirement, holding that “judges of the district

courts and the courts of appeals should be permitted to exercise

their sound discretion in deciding which of the two prongs of the

qualified immunity analysis should be addressed first in light of

the circumstances in the particular case at hand.” Pearson v .

Callahan, 129 S.Ct. 808, 818 (2009).

10 In this case, the court has expressed its doubt that

Griffin’s First Amendment rights were violated by Garrison’s

initial denial of his application for unemployment benefits.

But, even if the right asserted by Griffin exists and was

violated, the general absence of federal precedent recognizing

such a right in this context shows that such right was not

“clearly established” in this circuit at the time of Garrison’s

challenged conduct. No court in this circuit (or, seemingly, in

any other federal circuit) has suggested that a First Amendment

right to receive state unemployment benefits exits even when the

applicant has been discharged from private employment for cause

as a result of having engaged in “political” speech during work

hours, contrary to a private employer’s established policies.

See generally Maldonado v . Fontanes, 568 F.3d 263, 269 (1st Cir.

2009) (“[T]he salient question is whether the state of the law at

the time of the alleged violation gave the defendant fair warning

that [her] particular conduct was unconstitutional.”).2

2 The court is aware that a few state courts have concluded that, under certain circumstances, an individual’s First Amendment rights can be violated by the denial of unemployment benefits. See, e.g., Frigm v . Unemployment Compensation Bd. of Review, 642 A.2d 629, 633 (Pa. Commw. C t . 1994); McCall v . Unemployment Compensation Bd. of Review, 717 A.2d 623, 625 (Pa. Commw. C t . 1998); De Grego v . Levine, 362 N.Y.S.2d 207, 208-09 (N.Y. App. Div. 1974), aff’d on other grounds, 347 N.E.2d 611 (N.Y. 1976). Nevertheless, it can hardly be said that those state court opinions “clearly establish” the constitutional right asserted by Griffin in this case.

11 In other words, in this circuit there has been no

“announcement of the rule establishing the right [that was]

unambiguous and widespread, such that the unlawfulness of

[Garrison’s] particular conduct [would] be apparent . . . to

reasonable public officials.” Brady v . Dill, 187 F.3d at 116.

Garrison was neither “plainly incompetent” nor did she “knowingly

violate the law” when she initially denied Griffin’s application

for benefits. Malley, 475 U.S. at 341. She i s , then, entitled

to the protections afforded by qualified immunity.

Parenthetically, the court notes that, although she has not

raised the point, Garrison is probably also shielded from

liability by the absolute immunity afforded quasi-judicial

actors. See, e.g., Calderon v . Connecticut, 2007 WL 3124717

(Oct. 2 4 , 2007 D.Conn.) (department of labor officials who ruled

against plaintiff’s application for unemployment benefits were

entitled to quasi-judicial immunity); Vance v . Watts, 2007 WL

924259 (C.D. Ill. March 2 7 , 2007) (same); Madden v . Chattanooga

City Wide Service Dept., 2007 WL 895708 (E.D. Tenn. March 2 1 ,

2007) (same); Howard v . Food Lion, Inc., 232 F. Supp. 2d 585

(M.D. N.C. 2002) (same). See generally Butz v . Economou, 438

U.S. 478 (1978); Bettencourt v . Bd. of Reg. in Med. of the

Commonwealth of Mass., 904 F.2d 772 (1st Cir. 1990).

12 Conclusion

It is unlikely that Garrison violated Griffin’s First

Amendment rights when she supportably determined that he had been

discharged “for cause” and, therefore, concluded that he was

ineligible for unemployment benefits - particularly since the

process, once completed, resulted in an award of those benefits.

Drawing too close an analogy between Griffin’s case and those

decided by the Supreme Court under the Free Exercise Clause to

conclude that Garrison violated Griffin’s constitutional rights

would be problematic. To do so would, presumably, mean that an

employee discharged for cause for having engaged in otherwise

lawful speech (e.g., neither threatening nor defamatory) that

was, say, racist, or vulgar, or sexist, or insubordinate, would,

nevertheless, enjoy a constitutionally protected right to receive

state unemployment benefits. An exception of that sort would

substantially undermine the general rules that employees

discharged “for cause” are ineligible for unemployment benefits,

and that private employers are entitled to establish standards of

decorum and conduct consistent with their business interests.

In any event, even if she erred in denying Griffin’s

application for benefits and even if her decision can be said to

have violated Griffin’s constitutional rights, Garrison is

plainly entitled to qualified immunity (and, in all likelihood,

13 quasi-judicial immunity). S o , for the reasons discussed, as well

as those set forth in defendant’s memoranda (document nos. 46-1

and 4 7 - 1 ) , plaintiff’s motion for summary judgment (document n o .

44) is denied and defendant’s motion for summary judgment

(document n o . 47) is granted. Garrison’s supplemental motion for

summary judgment raising essentially the same issues (document

no. 52) is moot. The Clerk of Court shall enter judgment in

accordance with this order and close the case.

SO ORDERED.

January 1 3 , 2011

cc: John R. Griffin, Jr., pro se Karen A . Schlitzer, Esq. Nancy J. Smith, Esq.