Supreme Court Rules Texas Woman Arrested For Political Speech

Sylvia Gonzalez spent hours in a Texas jail charged with a crime engineered by her political opponent, the mayor of the city of Castle Hills. Now, nearly five years after that horrible day, the US Supreme Court has just said that her civil rights lawsuit against the mayor and his allies can move forward. The court’s decision is meaningful not just for Sylvia, but for other Americans who face retaliatory criminal charges for their speech.

Quantifying how many crimes there are in the United States is practically impossible. At the federal level, there are over 5,000 criminal laws. But regulations can also make certain things crimes. With the US Code of Federal Regulations running over 175,000 pages, there is no good survey of all the ways federal law can be breached. That also doesn’t account for state and local laws. A big state like Texas has thousands of existing laws and adds to them whenever the legislature meets. The state created at least 50 new criminal laws in the most recent legislative session.

Many of these laws sound like common sense prohibitions. But the sheer quantity of the laws—and the malleable way they are often written—makes it possible for bad actors to go in search of a crime to pin on their enemies. This is something that Justice Neil Gorsuch picked up on during the oral argument in Sylvia’s case when he was questioning the city’s attorney.

The legal question that the Court considered was what evidence Sylvia needed to present to demonstrate that her charges were politically motivated. At a city council meeting, a petition Sylvia had organized in support of removing the city manager who was misplaced in her binder. She found the petition and returned it without ever leaving the council chambers.

She was not arrested by the officers at the meeting and a detective who investigated her for weeks could find no crime. But a friend of the mayor was appointed as a special investigator and worked hard to find a crime to pin on her. Weeks after the incident, Sylvia was charged under Texas’ anti-tampering laws, which makes it a crime to remove a government document intentionally.

The Institute for Justice (IJ) attorneys representing her showed that no one had ever been arrested or prosecuted under that statute for such conduct. Most people charged with violating the law had forged social security numbers, driver’s licenses, or immigration papers.

The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Sylvia saying that this wasn’t enough. Instead, Sylvia needed to prove that someone had violated the law in the same way but had never been prosecuted for it. That gave Sylvia and anyone else in her situation an almost impossible task. The government doesn’t typically keep records of times when people aren’t arrested.

At oral argument, the attorney for the city said that people like Sylvia could look for such evidence in the news. That didn’t satisfy the justices and the Court sided with Sylvia saying that “the demand for virtually identical and identifiable comparators goes too far” and that her evidence should be considered.

Recent research from IJ shows that retaliation experienced by Sylvia is a bigger problem than Americans probably realize. The report, Unaccountable, found that, among federal appeals where officials claimed qualified immunity, violations of First Amendment rights were surprisingly common—and most often, they involved retaliation by government officials against citizens engaging in protected speech or activity.

Sylvia’s case is not done, but it has overcome a significant hurdle. After the decision, she reflected on her experience: “This has been a nightmare for the last five years. “It has kept me up at night, but finally I can sleep knowing that the nightmare I’ve gone through will protect critics from retaliation in the future.”

The First Amendment protects our rights to free speech and to participate in the political process free from fear of retribution. The courthouse doors need to be open for people who have faced retaliation.