High Court Backs Award to Officer for Meeting Ouster

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday let stand a damage award against a former American Civil Liberties Union lawyer charged with violating the rights of a Newport Beach policeman who was ejected from a public meeting on police surveillance.

The court, ruling without comment, rejected arguments that ACLU lawyer Rees Lloyd did not violate Officer Richard Long’s rights when he ordered him to leave a 1980 ACLU meeting open to the public.

The case marked the first time that the ACLU, for decades a proponent of individual rights, or one of its lawyers has been held liable for infringing on the rights of others. The ACLU earlier paid Long $35,000 as part of a settlement for its damages. A state court had assessed Lloyd, who was also named as a defendant in the suit, $10,000 in damages and $36,000 for Long’s legal fees.

In an earlier appellate decision rejecting ACLU arguments, a justice wrote in a footnote: “The ACLU has since made its peace with Long and is no longer a party. . . .” For Long, now a sergeant who supervises the Newport Beach police robbery-homicide squad, the end of the 10-year-long case came as a pleasant surprise.

“I’m glad to have it behind me. For me, this lawsuit was a matter of principle,” said Long, adding that he took personal exception to his ouster from the meeting.

“I didn’t have a problem with registering at the meeting as a police officer or having a policeman attending an ACLU meeting,” Long said. “But to eject you out of the meeting and make a spectacle for the purpose of embarrassing you as an individual, or embarrassing a police department, was just inappropriate, and it didn’t reflect favorably on their support of individual rights.”

Long, who had registered as a police officer at a 1980 ACLU-sponsored conference in Newport Beach, was secretly tape-recording the meeting and taking notes on what was said, according to court documents. He contended that as a community relations officer, he had a right to attend and learn the ACLU’s opinion of his department’s activities.

Early in the meeting Long was recognized by an ACLU lawyer in the audience. But his presence wasn’t revealed until an afternoon session on police surveillance, when Linda Valentino, then an activist against police spying and now executive director of the Los Angeles Trial Lawyers Assn., asked Long to comment on the discussion. Lloyd demanded that Long identify himself and asked him to step outside, threatening to slap him when he hesitated, according to court testimony.

After being confronted, Long told the audience that he was there because he had a legitimate interest in knowing the public’s concerns about his department so that the problems could be remedied. He then left the meeting and later filed a civil suit against Lloyd, Valentino and the ACLU. Subsequent rulings eliminated Valentino from the case, and the ACLU later settled with Long.

Lloyd’s attorneys had challenged a California Supreme Court decision last April that let stand a lower court’s ruling which stated that Long’s removal from the conference was discriminatory under the Unruh Civil Rights Act.

ACLU lawyers had vigorously defended the officer’s ejection, saying the right of free association allowed conference organizers to turn away someone they believed was an undercover “government agent.”

Lloyd’s attorney, Hugh R. Manes, said the decision set a “dangerous precedent” by lowering the safeguards for freedom of speech.

“It says basically that you can’t throw a police officer out of a meeting who is spying on you,” Manes said. “This is a freedom-of-speech issue and freedom-of-association (issue), and the right to protest.”

If the ACLU decides to also pay Lloyd’s damages, the Southern California chapter would be liable for more than $200,000 in damages and attorney’s fees stemming from the case and its long appeals process. An ACLU spokeswoman said the organization has yet to decide if it will pay Lloyd’s damages.

Long’s attorney, Jeffrey M. Epstein, said ACLU meeting organizers knew of Long’s attendance early in the meeting but waited until late in the day to “use him” by embarrassing him in public to make a point.

“They should have come up to Richard Long and told him of their feelings about having an officer there at their meeting and asked him to leave, or at least announced to the people attending the seminar that an officer was present, rather than trying to make a point of Richard Long’s attendance and then kick him out,” Epstein said.

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