Washington, D.C. Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court brought back a woman from Texas’s civil rights claim against her city for what she says was an unfair arrest based on politics.
The decision means that plaintiff Sylvia Gonzalez, 76, has another chance to go after her revenge claim against Castle Hills, a suburb of San Antonio. Gonzalez was caught stealing a government paper in 2019, not long after becoming a city council member.
Gonzalez said she put in her binder by accident a paper copy of a petition asking the city to fire its city manager before she noticed her mistake. Edward Treviño, the mayor, asked Gonzalez why she had the document and then called the cops.
After a few weeks, Gonzalez was charged with tampering with government papers, which is a less serious crime. She turned herself in and was kept in the Bexar County Jail for one night. The charges were dropped in the end.
Gonzalez, who was the city’s first Latina council member, said that she was arrested because of the petition, which said that the city manager wasn’t doing his job. After that, she sued the city and a few officials, saying they had hurt her First Amendment rights.
Gonzales was found not guilty by the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals because she did not provide enough proof to back her claim that she was arrested because of political revenge. Judges told Gonzales that he should have shown proof that other people who had also tampered with government papers had not been caught.
Gonzalez’s lawyers said that the Texas laws against mischief had never been used to arrest someone for stealing a document by accident. Usually, the laws were used to punish things like making fake social security numbers, green cards, checks, or hiding proof of murder. Gonzalez’s lawyer said that the fact that the charge was so weak and one-of-a-kind showed that the arrest was political revenge.
In March, when the case was before the Supreme Court, the justices compared Gonzalez’s arrest to jaywalking, which is another small crime for which police “typically exercise their discretion not to arrest.”
It turned out that the lower court had, in fact, taken a “overly cramped” view of the key case law it used to make its ruling.
The case, Gonzalez v. Trevino, will now be sent back to lower courts to be looked at again.
I’ve been having a terrible time for five years. “It kept me up at night, but now I can finally sleep because I know that the nightmare I’ve been through will keep critics safe in the future,” Gonzalez said in a statement.
In a separate statement, the city of Castle Hills said, “Even though this extends the deadline, we welcome the 5th Circuit’s further review of the case.”
