Earlier this month, the San Antonio-area enclave of Castle Hills agreed to pay $500,000 to former city council member Sylvia Gonzalez, who had alleged that political opponents in the local government orchestrated criminal charges to silence her. (Read her full story here.) The agreement also requires officials to participate in training on First Amendment retaliation and follows a Supreme Court ruling that made it easier to sue government officials accused of using the police against critics.
Gonzalez, now 79, was charged in 2019 with tampering with a government record after she’d been involved in an effort to oust the then-city manager. Prosecutors dismissed the case, which hinged on her having placed a stack of petition signatures in a binder, and she sued alleging retaliatory arrest—a legal term for government officials manufacturing a reason to charge someone as revenge for exercising a protected right like free speech. Before it could go to a jury, the case went to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal appellate court for Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The appellate judges ruled against Gonzalez by very narrowly interpreting a recent Supreme Court ruling that had created a path for her case. But, last year, the Supreme Court said the circuit’s interpretation was “overly cramped” and threw out the appellate ruling—to the relief of free speech advocates—sending Gonzalez’s case back down to the district level.
If the lawsuit had gone to trial, jurors would have been asked to decide only whether officials decided to arrest her in retaliation for her speech, said Anya Bidwell, an attorney for the libertarian-leaning public interest law firm the Institute for Justice, who represented Gonzalez. Courts have created a host of ways for government officials to delay or avoid altogether having lawsuits against them heard, Bidwell said. That Castle Hills came to the table so quickly after its attempts to have the lawsuit preemptively thrown out, she said, shows that “The second [the government entities] actually have to go to a jury, they settle.”
In a motion to approve the settlement, council member Jason Smith, who was not in office when Gonzalez was arrested six years ago, said the agreement was not an admission of wrongdoing. “This resolution of the litigation allows all involved to focus on positively serving their communities and fostering constructive public dialogue,” he said.
In an interview afterward, Castle Hills Mayor J.R. Treviño said the city’s insurance was willing to cover the $500,000, and settling was a better option than protracted litigation. “It was just a matter of, how much money do we need to spend to be right?” he said. “It was really in the best interest of the city to be done.”
Gonzalez said the hours she spent in jail, the public attention on her arrest, and statements Treviño made about her during the litigation have “totally ruined my health.” Along with the monetary settlement, city officials agreed to send its employees to training that the Texas Municipal League will develop about Gonzalez’s case.
“I did it for myself obviously, but also for the people that come after me,” she said of her lawsuit. “I don’t want them to have to deal with something like this. And people prior to me have been dealing with it and not getting anywhere. They’ve been falsely accused and prosecuted for things that are actually just political intimidation. I just don’t want it to happen to anyone else.”
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