Pro-free speech group the Liberty Justice Center has filed a First Amendment lawsuit, Peyton v. Barnes, in the US District Court for the Western District of Kentucky.
Mason Barnes is the Simpson County Judge Executive, an elected official who administers the county’s local government, and who the lawsuit alleges infringed on the First Amendment rights of Joel Peyton, a Kentucky whistleblower.
We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.
It all started when Peyton and a group of other citizens opposed a project to build a warehouse – which involved the local government’s Industrial Authority buying farmland for the purpose – and began filing requests for open records.
This resulted in the resignation of the Authority’s director and the decision to abandon the land purchase, the Liberty Justice Center explains.
Barnes comes into the story as a member of the Authority – and someone who “stood to benefit personally from another deal negotiated by the Industrial Authority, as his own construction company contracted to build a house on a parcel that was sold by the Industrial Authority,” the free speech group said in announcing the lawsuit.
This conflict of interest was not disclosed, and so last summer, Peyton filed an ethics complaint against Barnes, which led to the confirmation that the county’s judge executive in fact had violated the ethics code.
Barnes then decided the smart thing to do would be to block Peyton from accessing his official social media page – even though such pages are considered to be a public forum. In the past, the US Supreme Court found that blocking constituents or censoring their comments left on an official account was a breach of their free speech rights, and an action allowing those affected to sue.
The goal of Peyton v. Barnes is for the court to permanently prohibit the county official from violating constituents’ First Amendment rights, related to online speech.
Joel Peyton thanked the Liberty Justice Center for handling the lawsuit on his behalf, and added that Barnes trying to silence him on the internet merely “adds another ethics violation to his record.”
The free speech group’s local counsel, attorney Steven Megerle, reiterated that public officials such as judge executives and magistrates cannot censor constituents.
The lawsuit’s key argument is that they in particular should not try to do that to retaliate against those standing up to officials’ unethical or corrupt practices.
