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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld a district court’s ruling allowing a lawsuit brought by a campus police officer against his employer, the University of Michigan at Dearborn, to proceed.
William Ashford sued the university and his supervisors in 2019 after he was suspended for 10 days without pay for talking to a reporter at The Detroit Times about his concerns that the campus police had mishandled a student’s allegation of sexual assault by a professor. Ashford, who had worked for the police force for two years, sought monetary damages and the removal of the suspension from his record.
The defendants argued in a motion for summary judgment that the university and the officers couldn’t be sued in their official capacity because they were protected by sovereign immunity, which holds that the government cannot be sued without its consent. The officers also argued that they were entitled to qualified immunity, which shields public officials from lawsuits for violating people’s rights—unless they break clearly defined laws.
The district court denied the immunity claims, arguing that the defendants’ actions “clearly violated Ashford’s well-established constitutional right to free speech.”
The defendants appealed the decision, which the appeals court affirmed Tuesday.
“Sovereign immunity does not bar this claim from proceeding,” the ruling read. “Likewise, qualified immunity does not shield from liability the individual officers involved in violating Ashford’s constitutional rights, because it is clearly established law that public employees speaking outside of the scope of their responsibilities on a matter of public concern are engaging in protected speech as private citizens.”
