Texas City Council Approves $500,000 Payment to Former Member Who Said Her Advocacy Led to a Bogus Arrest

Sylvia Gonzalez, a former Texas city council member who said her political opponents punished her activism by orchestrating her arrest on a bogus criminal charge, has agreed to settle the resulting federal civil rights lawsuit. On Tuesday night, the Castle Hills City Council approved the agreement, which includes a $500,000 payment and remedial First Amendment training for city officials.

The settlement was announced about 16 months after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Gonzalez v. Trevino, which revived Gonzalez’s lawsuit and made it easier for victims of retaliatory arrests to prove their First Amendment claims. The agreement “closes one chapter for Castle Hills and opens a new chapter for free speech,” said Anya Bidwell, the Institute for Justice attorney who argued Gonzalez’s case at the Supreme Court. “The First Amendment doesn’t come with handcuffs. This outcome sends a message to officials everywhere: if you retaliate against critics, you can be held to account.”

Gonzalez, who was elected to the Castle Hills City Council in 2019, antagonized Mayor Edward Trevino by spearheading a petition calling for the replacement of City Manager Ryan Rapelye. During a May 2019 city council meeting that addressed complaints about Rapelye’s performance, Gonzalez picked up the petition, which had been presented to the council, and placed it in her personal folder. Although she says she did that accidentally, Trevino, Police Chief John Siemens, and Alexander Wright, a “special detective” whom Siemens assigned to investigate Gonzalez, accused her of deliberately removing the document to avoid scrutiny of alleged improprieties in collecting signatures for the petition.

According to Trevino et al., that made Gonzalez guilty of tampering with a governmental record, a rarely charged misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and a $4,000 fine. Wright’s arrest affidavit, which he filed two months after Gonzalez’s alleged crime, cited her agitation against Rapelye as evidence of her offense.

“From her very first meeting in May of 2019,” Wright complained, Gonzalez “has been openly antagonistic to the city manager, Ryan Rapelye, wanting desperately to get him fired.” That plan, Wright explained, “involved collecting signatures on several petitions.” He complained that Gonzalez had visited a resident’s house to “get her signature on one of the petitions under false pretenses” by “misleading her” and “telling her several fabrications regarding Ryan Rapelye.”

As a result of Wright’s allegations, Gonzalez was briefly jailed and suffered the attendant damage to her reputation. Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales, according to Gonzalez’s Supreme Court petition, “dropped the charges as soon as he learned about them.”

Trevino et al. nevertheless achieved what Gonzalez says was their goal all along. “Gonzalez was so hurt by the experience and so embarrassed by the media coverage of her arrest,” the petition says, that “she gave up her council seat and swore off organizing petitions or criticizing her government.”

Gonzalez sued the city, Trevino, Siemens, and Wright in September 2020, arguing that the defendants had conspired to violate her First Amendment rights. A federal judge allowed the case to proceed, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit overrode that decision in July 2022, saying Gonzalez’s lawsuit was doomed by her failure to cite other cases in which people had not been arrested for conduct similar to hers.

The issue was how to apply the Supreme Court’s 2019 ruling in Nieves v. Bartlett, which established an exception to the general rule that bars a retaliation claim when there was probable cause for an arrest. Even if an arrest was otherwise valid, the Court held in Nieves, a plaintiff can prove a First Amendment violation by presenting “objective evidence that he was arrested when otherwise similarly situated individuals not engaged in the same sort of protected speech had not been.”

In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts used a jaywalking example to illustrate that exception. “At many intersections,” Roberts wrote, “jaywalking is endemic but rarely results in arrest. If an individual who has been vocally complaining about police conduct is arrested for jaywalking at such an intersection, it would seem insufficiently protective of First Amendment rights to dismiss the individual’s retaliatory arrest claim on the ground that there was undoubted probable cause for the arrest.”

Gonzalez asked the Supreme Court to review the 5th Circuit’s decision, arguing that the appeals court’s understanding of the Nieves exception was excessively demanding. In an unsigned opinion joined by eight justices, the Court agreed.

Under the 5th Circuit’s reading of Nieves, the jaywalker whom Roberts imagined would have to cite specific cases in which less vocal pedestrians illegally crossed a street without being arrested. That interpretation was wrong, the Supreme Court said: “To fall within the exception, a plaintiff must produce evidence to prove that his arrest occurred in such circumstances. The only express limit we placed on the sort of evidence a plaintiff may present for that purpose is that it must be objective in order to avoid ‘the significant problems that would arise from reviewing police conduct under a purely subjective standard.'”

The 5th Circuit “thought Gonzalez had to provide very specific comparator evidence—that is, examples of identifiable people who ‘mishandled a government petition’ in the same way Gonzalez did but were not arrested,” the Supreme Court said. “Although the Nieves exception is slim, the demand for virtually identical and identifiable comparators goes too far.”

That victory for Gonzalez evidently motivated the Castle Hills City Council, which Trevino chairs, to settle the case rather than risk a jury verdict in her favor. Gonzalez agreed to drop her claims against the individual defendants and settle with the city alone. The city did not admit liability. But in addition to paying Gonzalez $500,000, the Institute for Justice says, the city agreed to “work with the Texas Municipal League to offer a statewide training on First Amendment retaliation.” Castle Hills officials “will be required to complete this training,” which will include discussion of the Supreme Court’s holding in Gonzalez v. Trevino.

“It’s been more than five years, and today I can finally breathe,” Gonzalez said. “I never wanted to end up in a Supreme Court fight, but I kept going because what happened to me shouldn’t happen to anyone. Those who went after me have been held accountable. I didn’t do this just for myself. I’m proud that this win will make it easier for ordinary people to stand up when officials try to punish them for speaking out.”

As Justice Neil Gorsuch emphasized in Nieves, the need for a remedy in cases like this is apparent when you consider all of the potential criminal charges that can be deployed against people whose criticism or advocacy irks government officials. “History shows that governments sometimes seek to regulate our lives finely, acutely, thoroughly, and exhaustively,” Gorsuch wrote in his partial concurrence. “In our own time and place, criminal laws have grown so exuberantly and come to cover so much previously innocent conduct that almost anyone can be arrested for something. If the state could use these laws not for their intended purposes but to silence those who voice unpopular ideas, little would be left of our First Amendment liberties, and little would separate us from the tyrannies of the past or the malignant fiefdoms of our own age.”