Vermont Man Who Cursed At, Flipped Off Cop Scores Settlement From The State
from the policed-by-snowflakes dept
You know, rather than paying out thousands or millions in lawsuits for retaliatory arrests, maybe states should just spend more money on skin thickening for their police officers.
It’s not like case law isn’t pretty much completely established at this point. Flipping the bird to a cop is protected speech. So is complaining, however profanely, about your recent experience with said officer.
The precedent is everywhere. Obviously, cops will never be happy when someone they stop or address responds with one finger salutes and/or insulting verbiage. But being unhappy is not the same thing as probable cause for an arrest. “Contempt of cop” is not a crime. But try convincing cops of that fact. It’s impossible.
Refusing to learn isn’t the same thing as being a “reasonable” officer. And that means it’s almost impossible to secure qualified immunity when you’ve arrested someone for being rude to you.
Since that’s the direction this case was headed, the state of Vermont has chosen to exit early, rather than wait and see just how bad the damages might get if handed over to a jury.
Vermont has agreed to pay $175,000 to settle a lawsuit on behalf of a man who was charged with a crime for giving a state trooper the middle finger in 2018, the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday.
The lawsuit was filed in 2021 by the ACLU of Vermont on behalf of Gregory Bombard, of St. Albans. It says Bombard’s First Amendment rights were violated after an unnecessary traffic stop and retaliatory arrest in 2018.
All Bombard had to do was extend a finger and use his voice a bit following a traffic stop. In return, he’ll be walking away with $100,000 for himself and $75,000 for his legal representative from FIRE and the ACLU.
As his lawsuit alleges, he was pulled over after driving away from the initial traffic stop with a middle finger extended. (Bombard denies he flipped off the cop.) When he was pulled over for a second time, he cursed at the officer, who then unbelievably (and unconstitutionally) told Bombard his actions and words were “disorderly conduct 101.” Bombard was arrested, his car was impounded, and he was jailed for an hour.
The officer was clearly in the wrong, something made clear almost immediately as the criminal court dropped one of the charges against him and the state soon dropped the other charge. Qualified immunity was denied and the trial court’s decision contained this great paragraph that expresses incredulity at the ridiculous defenses raised by the government.
The State also argues that Mr. Bombard has insufficiently pleaded that his free speech rights have been “chilled.” It asserts: “because the second stop, arrest, and towed vehicle were lawful and he continued to later protest these actions in both criminal and civil court, Plaintiff does not cognizably allege such actions chilled his speech.”
It supports this argument largely by reference to cases in which, under the circumstances presented, no injury was apparent or at least only an indirect injury was asserted. The State’s argument is out of step with Vermont’s Rule 12(b)(6) standard. Moreover, if filing a lawsuit based on chilled speech itself proved that no speech was chilled, no legal claim premised on chilled speech could ever be cognizable.
So, that’s how things were going late last year. Six months later, Bombard and his legal reps are getting paid for an arrest any reasonable cop should have known would be impermissible under the Constitution. Unfortunately for Vermont residents, they’ll be paying $175,000 extra for this level of service.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, free speech, gregory bombard, jay riggen, st albans police, vermont
Comments on “Vermont Man Who Cursed At, Flipped Off Cop Scores Settlement From The State”
New legislation needed
We need two things…
1) A national registry of law enforcement officers that tracks their start/stop dates at each municipality where they are employed as well as any negative occurrences that led to their no longer being employed at a location and any lawsuits that they have been a defendant in and lost…
2) Mandatory Malpractice Insurance for law enforcement officers that pays out when they are in situations like the PO mentioned in this article – make the premiums reasonable for L.E. with clean histories and maybe state/county/cities can offer to pay the premiums for L.E. members who can behave themselves. But after a clear mess up like the one in this article, the premiums go up – and eventually it becomes too expensive for the state/county/city to pay their premiums and they have to be paid for by the LE person themselves.
This has the benefit of not requiring tax-payers to have to pay off fines to other tax-payers when L.E. personnel screw up, and keeps L.E. personnel from being able to screw up too many times before it’s no longer financially feasible for anyone to hire them, or for them to be able to pay their own premiums. And if they try to serve without having insurance? It’s a crime and they get fired and/or arrested – just like being required to have some minimum level of liability insurance on a motor vehicle. And the national registry means they can’t get fired and move to the next town over and start again because their previous job information is available to any new state/county/city that may be interested in hiring them.
Re:
None of that really does anything.
Employment history of basically everyone, including government employees, is already widely available. The problem is that the police departments don’t care, not that they don’t know.
Cities also already pay for liability insurance to cover their police officers (and/or hire actuaries and self-insure those officers). Either way, those insurers already adjust premiums to account for risk. Arbitrarily splitting those policies out into individual policies might sound impressive, but the total cost will remain exactly the same, because the total risk remains exactly the same. The cities are currently happy to pay the cost, and they will continue to be happy to pay the cost regardless of the number of line items you split that cost into. Payouts are made, premiums go up, and nobody cares.
Which is ultimately the problem: voters don’t care about the cost of legal liability. If they did, then this payout would already be sufficient for the voters to revolt. If they won’t object to $100k, they won’t do anything for an extra $10k risk premium. And unless voters object, playing monetary games won’t work. It’s not the city’s money after all, wasting it only hurts if they lose the next election because of it.
What would be interesting in stories like this would be to highlight the crime that happened around that time.
Like “officer arrests man for flipping him off while child kidnapping went unanswered”