Texas Grandmother Wins Supreme Court Case After Facing Jail for Alleged Political Retaliation

Gonzalez in 2019 organized a petition to remove the city manager of Castle Hills, Texas from office. Afterward, she was jailed for mishandling a government document, charges that were eventually dropped, and ones she claims were levied in retaliation to her political actions.

The lawsuit argued that the action to charge her in this way violated her rights under the First and 14th Amendments of the Constitution.

Once elected, Gonzalez introduced a petition calling for Rapelye to be replaced with a previous city manager who his critics thought had done a better job in the role. Discussions of the petition a the council meeting were “contentious” according to records in the court.

The document in question was actually the non-binding petition that she herself had initiated and created, which she had “misplaced” in her binder after the contentious council meeting. After discovering the error she allegedly put the document back and thought nothing of it.

“I didn’t even know what I was accused of,” Gonzalez told Fox News. “I’d never been in jail… and it was very scary to an old lady like me.”

Gonzalez accused the police chief of assigning a “trusted friend and local attorney” to act as a “special detective” who produced an affidavit accusing Gonzalez of fabrications and probable cause that Gonzalez stole her own petition.

“A person commits an offense if he: intentionally destroys, conceals, removes, or otherwise impairs the verity, legibility, or availability of a governmental record,” says § 37.10 of the Texas Penal Code.

Institute for Justice senior Counsel Anya Bidwell said this statute was mainly used for punishing people stealing fake social security numbers, check forgeries, and counterfeit green cards. Bidwell asserted that in 10 years of looking at County data, she couldn’t find “anything even remotely similar” to how Gonzalez was charged.

“They wanted to punish me, and they wanted to make sure I went to jail. And they did a good job,” Gonzalez said.

“The sheriff [that] swore me in, he was not qualified is what they said,” said Gonzalez in a March interview with WOAI. “The city attorney was sitting right there, nobody said anything. They waited until the 30 days were up and then they told me ‘Oh he’s not qualified to swear you in’.”

However, the new ruling from the Supreme Court overturned this Fifth Circuit decision, saying the court had been “overly cramped” about the rules regarding evidentiary standards. This ruling allows Gonzalez to continue forward with her lawsuit claim which will now head back to the Fifth Circuit.

“That court thought Gonzalez had to provide very specific comparator evidence — that is, examples of identifiable people who ‘mishandled a government petition’ in the same way Gonzalez did but were not arrested,” the Supreme Court said in an unsigned opinion. “The demand for virtually identical and identifiable comparators goes too far.”