First Amendment / qualified immunity
Public comments stay at issue in Eddy County speech case
A federal appeals court said Jason Sanchez can still press his claim that county officials singled out his criticism of the sheriff’s office. The ruling leaves the First Amendment dispute to a jury and keeps claims against Mike Gallagher and the county board in play.
The Tenth Circuit said the dispute over Sanchez’s unread comment belongs in the district court, not on a fresh factual appeal. It also let the case continue against Mike Gallagher and the Eddy County Board of Commissioners.
- The Tenth Circuit said the county could not relitigate the facts behind a speech-retaliation claim.
- Jason Sanchez says he got a promise his comment would be read at a public meeting, then saw it go unread.
- The lawsuit keeps going against Eddy County and Mike Gallagher.
- The panel said qualified-immunity appeals usually have to start from the trial court’s facts.
- A former Eddy County resident says he tried to get his criticism of the sheriff’s office heard at a public meeting in New Mexico, only to have it left unread
A former Eddy County resident says he tried to get his criticism of the sheriff’s office heard at a public meeting in New Mexico, only to have it left unread. The Tenth Circuit said that kind of fight cannot be turned into a second factual hearing just because county officials invoked qualified immunity.
Jason Sanchez had submitted a public comment through Eddy County’s website and got confirmation that it would be read aloud at a Board of County Commissioners meeting. He later sued after county manager Mike Gallagher did not read it, saying the decision punished him for the viewpoint in his comment.
Why the county lost the rewrite
The panel said appellate courts hearing qualified-immunity appeals generally must accept the district court’s facts, unless a narrow exception applies. That matters because the defendants tried to press their own account of why Sanchez’s comment was not read, instead of living with the version the trial judge credited.
On that version, Sanchez wrote a coarse complaint about alleged corruption in the sheriff’s office. The court said that factual backdrop belongs to the lower court for now, not to a fresh debate on appeal.
What survives
The ruling does not decide whether Sanchez wins the case. It does mean the lawsuit can keep moving against Gallagher, in his individual and official capacities, and against the Eddy County Board of Commissioners.
The court pointed to an earlier Tenth Circuit case, Mesa v. White, as part of the same basic rule: when government speech disputes turn into viewpoint-discrimination claims, officials do not get to erase the facts by redrafting them on appeal.