U.S. District Judge Jamal N. Whitehead on Thursday granted the defendants’ renewed motion to dismiss, ending the case brought by Scott Carlson, Brian Robillard, Alison Hallifax, Matthew Peterson, Josh Frei, and Tyler Parnell against Mayor Angela Birney, Fire Chief Adrian Sheppard, and Human Resources Director Cathryn Laird.
The plaintiffs, who were terminated between April and May 2022, alleged that the city violated their First Amendment free exercise and free speech rights, as well as their Fourteenth Amendment equal protection rights, by revoking religious exemptions and failing to provide accommodation positions.
Whitehead rejected the plaintiffs’ attempt to hold the City of Redmond liable under Monell, holding that the Executive Order implementing Governor Jay Inslee’s Proclamation 21-14 was not an independent municipal policy but rather a mandate to enforce state law.
The court also dismissed the plaintiffs’ theory that the city ratified individual misconduct, noting that pre-conduct statements about wanting “consequences for the unvaccinated” did not establish that she had actual knowledge of the specific termination decisions.
On the individual capacity claims, Whitehead held that the defendants were entitled to qualified immunity because the right to refuse a vaccine mandate for healthcare-providing firefighters was not “clearly established” in 2021 and 2022.
The judge pointed to the Ninth Circuit’s recent en banc decision in Health Freedom Def. Fund, Inc. v. Carvalho, which upheld a similar vaccine mandate under rational basis review, and noted that courts “cannot judge [employers] with the clarity of hindsight,” a caution the court attributed to Petersen v. Snohomish Reg’l Fire & Rescue.
Whitehead also declined to apply issue preclusion from a parallel Title VII case that resulted in summary judgment for the city, reasoning that the constitutional claims under Section 1983 were not identical to the statutory claims analyzed previously.
The plaintiffs had previously amended their complaint once, but Whitehead found that further amendment would be futile given the structural deficiencies in their Monell arguments. The court also dismissed the qualified immunity claims with prejudice, noting that the absence of clearly established law could not be cured by amendment.
The case is now closed, with the six former firefighters receiving no relief for their terminations.