Conn. State Police Union v. Rovella

36 F.4th 54

CONNECTICUT STATE POLICE UNION, Plaintiff-Appellant,

v.James ROVELLA, Commissioner of Department of Emergency Services & Public Protection, Defendant-Appellee.

Docket No. 20-3530-cv

August Term, 2021

United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit.

Argued: October 29, 2021

Decided: June 2, 2022

Proloy K. Das (Kristen L. Zaehringer, Kevin W. Munn, on the brief), Murtha Cullina LLP, Hartford, CT, for Plaintiff-Appellant Connecticut State Police Union.

Michael K. Skold, Assistant Attorney General, for Clare Kindall, Solicitor General, William Tong, Attorney General, State of Connecticut, Hartford, CT, for Defendant-Appellee James Rovella, Commissioner of Department of Emergency Services & Public Protection.

Before: LYNCH, LOHIER, and BIANCO, Circuit Judges.

LOHIER, Circuit Judge:

The Contracts Clause of the United States Constitution forbids States from "pass[ing] any ... Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts." U.S. Const. art. I, § 10, cl. 1. We have long recognized that this prohibition is not absolute. States may impair contracts — including, as relevant here, ones to which they themselves are a party — so long as the law in question is reasonable and necessary to achieve a legitimate public purpose. In assessing the reasonableness and necessity of a law that impairs a public contract, we ask whether the State, in passing the law, was acting self-servingly or governing in the public interest. If the former, we accord the State less deference. If the latter, we properly defer to its determination that a law is reasonable and necessary.

The contract at issue in this case is a collective bargaining agreement currently in force between the Connecticut State Police Union ("CSPU") and the State of Connecticut. That agreement includes a provision that exempts certain police records from disclosure under the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act ("FOIA"). About a year after the Connecticut state legislature ratified the agreement, however, Connecticut found itself in the throes of a racial justice movement that began when George Floyd was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis. In response to Floyd's murder and the nationwide protests that followed, Connecticut lawmakers passed a law that, among other things, nullified FOIA exemptions such as the one in the agreement here.

The CSPU brought suit against James Rovella, the Commissioner of Connecticut's Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection (the "Commissioner"), alleging that the FOIA-related portions of the state law violated the Contracts Clause and moving for a preliminary injunction. The District Court (Haight, J. ) denied the motion primarily on the ground that the CSPU was unlikely to succeed on the merits of its claim since the law was reasonable and necessary to promote transparency and accountability for law enforcement. Because we conclude that the law served a legitimate public purpose and that the legislature, in passing it, acted not self-servingly but in the public interest, we agree and AFFIRM .

BACKGROUND

On July 1, 2018, the CSPU — the union representing Connecticut state troopers, sergeants, and master sergeants — entered into a collective bargaining agreement with the State of Connecticut, effective until June 30, 2022. Article 9, Section 2 of that agreement, the subject of this appeal, covers the conditions under which employee records may be released under Connecticut's FOIA. It provides:

When an employee, after notification to him/her that a freedom of information request has been made concerning his/her file, objects to the release of that information on the basis of reasonable belief that the release would constitute an invasion of his/her privacy, the employee shall petition the Freedom of Information Commission for a stay on the release of said information, and the Department shall support the employee's petition and not release the information until the FOIC has made a final determination on the issue of whether said release would constitute an invasion of privacy. An employee's [official personnel folder] and internal affairs investigations with only a disposition of "Exonerated, Unfounded or Not Sustained" shall not be subject to the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act.

App'x 119 (emphases omitted).

The FOIA exemption reflected in the final sentence did not exist in the agreement that was in place between the parties from 2015 to 2018 but was added "in response to concerns regarding an increase in false anonymous complaints filed against Troopers." Conn. State Police Union v. Rovella, 494 F. Supp. 3d 210, 216 (D. Conn. 2020). Although Connecticut's FOIA generally provides that "all records maintained or kept on file by any public agency" are "public records" that anybody may inspect or copy, Conn. Gen. Stat. § 1–210(a) (2021), the non-disclosure provision of the collective bargaining agreement was permissible under Section 5–278(e) of the Connecticut General Statutes, which at the time provided that the terms of a collective bargaining agreement trumped "any general statute or special act," id. § 5–278(e).

Connecticut's legislature ratified the agreement in May 2019. A year later, on May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police officers arrested George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, after a convenience store clerk called 9-1-1 and reported him for allegedly buying cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill. What happened next is now well known. When Floyd resisted sitting in the back seat of the police squad car, saying he was claustrophobic, three officers pinned him face-down on the ground. A white officer knelt on Floyd's neck for nearly ten minutes while Floyd repeatedly said he could not breathe. Floyd was pronounced dead that night, and video of his encounter with the police went viral, sparking major protests against police brutality and racism in Minneapolis and around the country.

Amid a national outcry, on July 17, 2020, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont called a special session of the state legislature to "enact legislation to promote greater transparency and accountability for law enforcement." A Proclamation from His Excellency the Governor 3 (July 17, 2020), https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/Office-of-the-Governor/News/20200717-Call-of-July-2020-Special-Session.pdf. By official proclamation, Governor Lamont declared that the "killing of George Floyd has revealed once again the injustice and cruelty that Black people and other people of color suffer at the hands of law enforcement, and has thereby awoken the public's demand for reforms to our law enforcement agencies and progress toward a just and equitable society." Id. at 2. Invoking "what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called ‘the fierce urgency of now,’ " the Governor added that "much more work remain[ed] to be done" to "promot[e] police accountability and transparency." Id.

By the end of the month, the legislature had passed, and the Governor had signed, Public Act 20–1: An Act Concerning Police Accountability ("the Act"). Section 8 of the Act took aim at FOIA exemptions under Connecticut law such as the one at issue here. It repealed Section 5–278 and provided that "the provisions of [Connecticut's] Freedom of Information Act shall prevail" in the event of a conflict with a provision of a collective bargaining agreement "pertaining to the disclosure of disciplinary matters or alleged misconduct [that] would prevent the disclosure of documents required to be disclosed under [FOIA]." Public Act 20-1 § 8. Under Section 9, meanwhile:

No collective bargaining agreement or arbitration award entered into before, on or after the effective date of this section, by the state and any collective bargaining unit of the Division of State Police within the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection may prohibit the disclosure of any disciplinary action based on a violation of the code of ethics contained in the personnel file of a sworn member of said division.

Id. § 9. In a training bulletin for state troopers, the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, a statewide agency, described the Act as "[n]ullif[ying] collective bargaining language ... previously negotiated[ ] regarding the disclosure of disciplinary action, including Internal Affairs investigations." App'x 185.

On August 11, 2020, the CSPU filed this lawsuit against the Commissioner to enjoin Sections 8 and 9 of the Act for violating the Contracts Clause. The CSPU initially sought a temporary restraining order, which the District Court denied after concluding that it "ha[d] not demonstrated the requisite combination of likelihood of success on the merits on its Contract Clause claim [or] irreparable harm to Police Union members between today and the preliminary injunction hearing if a TRO is not issued at this time." Conn. State Police Union v. Rovella, No. 3:20-cv-01147 (CSH), 2020 WL 7419648, at *2 (D. Conn. Aug. 20, 2020). The District Court then held an expedited hearing on the CSPU's motion for a preliminary injunction, which it also denied. "On the present record," the District Court held, the CSPU had not shown that it was "likely to establish that the challenged provisions in the Act were not reasonable or necessary to achieve the state's legitimate public purpose" and therefore failed to establish that it was "likely to succeed on its Contracts Clause claim." Rovella, 494 F. Supp. 3d at 230.

In rejecting the CSPU's request for injunctive relief, the District Court applied our test in Buffalo Teachers Federation v. Tobe, 464 F.3d 362 (2d Cir. 2006), for determining whether a State has violated the Contracts Clause. The District Court asked (1) whether the contractual impairment was substantial and, if so, (2) whether the law served "a legitimate public purpose such as remedying a general social or economic problem" and, if so, (3) whether "the means chosen to accomplish this purpose [were] reasonable and necessary." Buffalo Tchrs., 464 F.3d at 368 ; see also Energy Rsrvs. Grp., Inc. v....