MONDAY JUNE 1, 2009 11:02 EDT
Salon.com
The facts of Pappas are simple.
The plaintiff was a white employee of the New York City Police Department -- working in a clerical position in information management -- when
he was fired for having sent blatantly racist and anti-Semitic replies in response to charity requests he received in the mail. Pappas admitted doing it, and said he did it to protest the charity requests. The NYPD fired him for having sent the replies on the ground that it did not want racist employees. He sued the NYPD, alleging that his First Amendment rights were violated by the firing, because he was clearly fired due to the content of the political views he expressed.
The district court judge dismissed Pappas' case, finding that the NYPD had a legitimate need to exclude racists from its employ, a need which outweighed Pappas' First Amendment rights. On appeal, two of the
three judges on the Second Circuit panel agreed with that ruling and dismissed Pappas' case. But not Sotomayor. She wrote a dissent emphasizing the strong First Amendment interests of Pappas' that were being violated -- however contemptible it was, it was pure political expression -- and she argued that it he was entitled to a jury trial to decide if the NYPD, under Supeme Court precedent, had any right to fire him for it.
Sotomayor's dissent in Pappas should end the slurs against her...
Read the rest:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/06/01/sotomayor/index.html
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