The Supreme Court unanimously ruled Thursday for a former councilwoman in Castle Hills, Texas, who says she was arrested for pushing for the removal of the city manager.
Sylvia Gonzalez lost her city council seat after she was apprehended in 2019, when she was 72, for misplacing a petition she circulated criticizing the city manager and calling for his ouster.
Ms. Gonzalez was put in jail for a day after she misplaced the petition in her binder at a council meeting for a few minutes. The petition was discovered at the end of the meeting, and officials charged her with attempting to conceal a government document she had spearheaded.
The justices said, that since Ms. Gonzalez demonstrated in court records that the criminal statute had not been used in this context against others, a retaliatory arrest occurred. This gives her a chance to win her claim, pending further proceedings at a lower court.
“The fact that no one has ever been arrested for engaging in a certain kind of conduct — especially when the criminal prohibition is longstanding and the conduct at issue is not novel — makes it more likely that an officer has declined to arrest someone for engaging in such conduct in the past,” the court wrote in an unsigned opinion.
The district attorney eventually dropped the charges against Ms. Gonzalez, but she lost her council seat representing Castle Hill, a town of just under 4,000 people. Her mugshot was circulated on local news.
Ms. Gonzalez said she believes she was targeted because city leaders wanted to replace her with their friend, the incumbent whom she had defeated in an election in which she promised to work to replace the city manager, claiming he was involved in corrupt practices. She organized a “FIX OUR STREETS” petition and moved to reinstate the previous city manager.
At her first council meeting, a constituent presented the petition, which caused chaos. The meeting had to be continued to another day, and during the debate, Ms. Gonzalez inadvertently placed the petition in her binder, according to her court papers.
Mayor Edward Trevino and others launched an investigation and eventually had her arrested on a misdemeanor charge of “intentionally destroy[ing], conceal[ing], remov[ing] or otherwise impair[ing] the verity, legibility or availability of a government record.”
Ms. Gonzalez said in court that the statute had never been used in the past 10 years to jail someone for any sort of similar conduct. She found that in Bexar County the law had been used against those falsifying green cards, concealing evidence of murder and counterfeiting government records and Social Security numbers.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Ms. Gonzalez because she couldn’t point to an example of another individual targeted for similar political conduct and misplacing a similar petition or government document.
The three-judge panel reasoned that for her to be able to sue the individuals, she needed to show another person — like herself — who was engaged in the same kind of actions but not arrested in order to reveal unequal treatment.
The high court said the 5th Circuit’s reasoning was too narrow.
• Alex Swoyer can be reached at aswoyer@washingtontimes.com.
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