Supreme Court limits "Whistleblower" revenge casesFollow

In the eternal quest to keep folks informed...Those of you with more free time than I this morning can read the entire 42 page ruling (PDF format) here. I found the case interesting (on the surface, again I haven't read the entire opinion) given the recent climate of whistleblowing and disclosures in the federal government especially regarding terrorism.

Can't you two just blow each other after work? Normal couples talk on the f'ucking phone.

We do!

That fu[Aqua][/Aqua]cking killed me!

/nod

Oh I see Alito cast the deciding vote while actually blowing Scalia. It's really kind of a shame he and Thomas have to actually show up at all. Just giving Scalia 3 votes and letting those two go play golf or perform hillarious pubic hair soda can practical jokes would realy be a lot more efficent.

Feel free to comment on the case when you know more.

No, I think not. You're halfwitted attempts at fumbling around having no idea what you're talking about are pretty amusing. My dead on target legal insight would be pretty boring.

Pray, enlighten us into the working of your crazy insecure paranoid mind oh great decoid of any understanding of leagal issues one!

I'll give you a somewhat shortened version. I'm going off memory, so some details may not be exact, but should be close enough for you to understand the basics of the case.

Basically, you've got an attorney. He's working a case. A case in which a police officer requested a warrant to search some location. The attorney wanted to challenge the warrant in court based on what he percieved to be inaccurate descriptions of some aspects of the site to be searched by the officer requesting the warrant.

He got into a disagreement with others at his place of employment about this issue. This disagreement became heated. He complained to his boss about it in a memo and insisted on making the challenge even though no one else agreed with him. The judge in the case also disagreed with him and didn't grant the challenge.

Some time later, he got transferred. Possibly because he didn't work well with others and refused to follow the lead of his bosses. Who knows for sure? Point is that he then sued saying that he was unfairly punished for writing that memo and speaking his mind about the case. He's trying to claim that his speech in this situation is constitutionally protected and that the transfer represented a punishment for speaking.


The problem is that in this case, he wasn't speaking freely. He was specifically employed to make recommendations for motions in court cases like this. The quality of his advice is specific to his value as an employee. If he gives bad advice, or (in this case) insists on making a legal challenge after everyone else has advised against it, it's reasonable for him to suffer the employment consequences of that bad choice.


The whistleblower angle in this case is incredibly thin. You could technically argue that he was trying to blow the whistle on a police officer who may have lied about the details he provided when obtaining a warrant. However, in this case he did make his legal challenge and it was denied by a judge. So it's irrelevant.

What the case is really about is whether an employee can call any communication he makes as part of his job "protected speech", and be immune to reprisal as a result. If he were talking about politics or the weather, then yes. Because those are topics upon which his employement is not based. If he uncovered some accounting anomaly and reported it, then yes as well. But disagreeing with your boss over a specific course of action you wish to take in the course of the performance of your duties *must* be something an employee takes responsibility for.

If I go into a planning meeting and argue with my bosses that we don't need to bother installing firewalls or virus scanners on our windows systems here at work, they'd be well within their rights to consider that when the next revue cycle comes around. Because I'm specifically employed to make those kinds of recommendations, and that would be a really crappy one. Now, if I was a secretary and I made the same statement then it would be protected speech as long as my duties and responsiblities do not include making decisions or cases about or for the computer systems at work.


Dunno. Seems like a reasonable ruling to me. What would be the counter argument? That no one should ever be held responsible for their decisions and statements at work? I can give crappy advice and not get fired for it? Think about it.

I'm going off memory, so some details may not be exact,

I highly highly reccomend stopping reading right there to everyone.

What I do think it does is make it a bit more costly for people to make false or poorly thought accusations. And I don't really see that as a bad thing.

If I were a functionaly retarded mobile telephone repair man I might not realize that the threat of the process and consequences of legal action are themselves a massive detterent to speaking out regardless of the certainty of a positive outcome, which given our system is nearly never.

Fortunately for me, I'm not said person.

Whew!

Speaking as someone who thinks that people should be responsible for the actions they take, it seems perfectly reasonable that someone be able to prove allegations before they make them.

If they could do that, they wouldn't be allegations, now would they Luigi?

Do you see why?

No. They don't have to prove them before making them. But if they can't prove them *after* they've made them, and *after* an investigation, and *after* a lawsuit, then they should be prepared to deal with the consequences of making that accusation.

Certainly, they are free to make any allegations they want, but that does not mean that they can do so without any repercussions. So, anyone making some kind of accusation should start by having proof *before* making it.

That's all this case is saying. Free speech does not mean speech free from reprisal. You can't just make wild accusations about someone and claim protection as a whistleblower if it doesn't pan out.

By a 5-4 vote, justices said the nation's 20 million public employees do not have carte blanche free speech rights to disclose government's inner-workings. New Justice Samuel Alito cast the tie-breaking vote.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the court's majority, said the First Amendment does not protect "every statement a public employee makes in the course of doing his or her job."
--------------------------------------------------------

yes it does. but not any more.

as your rights and freedoms get stripped away one by one, like imminent domain being used to strip you of property to sell to for profit companies........keep singing the party line.

the moral majority working...hard....against you.

this decision is about as unamerican as unamerican can get. it is censorship, pure and simple. a means to controll what you say, adn to limit the liability of what you see the government doing.

they have forgotton they work for us. but then, the republican party is all about making sure you work for them. 51 percent of you idiots voted for this, choke on it.