Inmate loses speech retaliation case

In this case, the plaintiff-inmate's First Amendment retaliation case was dismissed in the district court. The Court of Appeals agrees that he cannot win the case, so the free speech case is over..

The case is Baltas v. Maiga, a summary order issued on October 11. Plaintiff was locked up in a Connecticut prison. He was transferred to a prison in Virginia. He claims the transfer was in retaliation for filing internal grievances about the conditions of his confinement.

I know that many people do not want to hear this, but inmates have rights under the First Amendment to grieve their conditions of confinement without worrying about retaliation for the exercise of those rights. As it happens, these speech rights are not extensive, and there are many limitations for prisoners and inmates. But the fundamental right to file a grievance or complain about jail conditions is protected under the First Amendment. 

Here, plaintiff was transferred shortly after he filed the grievance. Normally, that would be enough to have a First Amendment claim, as we can assume the transfer was retaliatory since it took place soon after the speech act. But not for plaintiff. The Court of Appeals (Parker, Lohier and Nathan) finds that the prison was working on plaintiff's transfer months before he filed the grievance. That knocks out the causation element of his claim.

The causation problem in plaintiff's case is a common one. Many non-prisoner cases also allege retaliation, where the plaintiff engaged in protected activity (i.e., complaining about employment discrimination) and the defendant then subjected the plaintiff to an adverse action (i.e., demotion, termination, etc.). The employer in these cases will always try to show that the protected activity had nothing to do with the negative personnel action, and one way to show that is through evidence that the adverse decision would have taken place even without the protected activity. And the best way to do that is by showing that the termination, demotion, transfer, etc., was already in the planning stages prior to the protected activity.