Sacramento sheriff settles with activists after banning them from his Facebook page
Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones will pay two local African-American activists $16,000 each and establish social media policies protecting free speech on his Facebook account a year after he unconstitutionally banned them and other activists for posting critical comments on his official page.
The settlement reached with Tanya Faison of Black Lives Matter Sacramento and Sonia Lewis of the Liberation Collective for Black Sacramento was announced Thursday in a joint statement from the women’s attorneys and co-counsel American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.
The deal came more than a year after the ACLU sued Jones on behalf of Faison and Lewis on First Amendment grounds in Sacramento federal court for deleting the activists’ comments and barring the two from his page. Sheriff Jones claims more than 11,000 followers on his Facebook page.
“Sheriff Scott Jones owes the taxpayers of this county access, accountability and transparency,” Lewis said in prepared remarks. “Blocking constituents from the sheriff’s social media page is a clear abuse of power. ... This lawsuit is a victory and I hope it sends a clear message to Jones that he serves the people, not the other way around.”
Faison and Lewis were vocal critics on Jones’ page of the Sheriff’s Office’s handling of use-of-force incidents and Jones’ rejection of public oversight in the aftermath of the shooting of Mikel McIntyre, an unarmed black man, by deputies in 2017. After a stinging inspector general’s report on the shooting by former Sacramento police chief Rick Braziel, Jones blocked Braziel from interviewing deputies and barred him from the Sheriff’s Office.
Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert in 2018 cleared the deputies involved of wrongdoing in the shooting. A wrongful death lawsuit later filed in McIntyre’s death was settled in January for $1.75 million.
The settlement announcement came the same day sheriff’s officials released video footage of McIntyre’s shooting after three years and a successful legal battle by The Sacramento Bee to win its release.
Jones argued the social media page was neither an official sheriff’s account or public forum.
Jones renewed the claim Thursday in a statement to The Bee that his page was “intended for purely personal and political purposes” and said little will change from the site it was before the 2019 lawsuit.
“I will continue to use my page as before – as a platform to deliver information, opinions and political news to the public and my 11,000-plus followers,” he said in the statement.
Jones said he ultimately settled because of potentially lengthy court delays triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, legal costs and what the sheriff called the “nuisance-value amount” awarded to Faison and Lewis.
Faison and Lewis argued the ban was a form of official censorship and took Jones to court in January 2019.
“This case is about the right to criticize a public official in an online forum without being censored,” opened the 2019 lawsuit. “Sheriff Jones censored Plaintiffs’ voices during a critical time of public debate in Sacramento about whether and how his department should be subjected to outside oversight.”
U.S. District Court Judge Troy Nunley would later agree, ordering Jones in a February ruling to “unban” the activists, calling it a burden on their freedom of speech.
Faison said in the Thursday statement she was glad the case is now resolved and that Jones “will no longer be able to violate the First Amendment rights of his constituents as he did to mine. I hope this case will prevent others from having their constitutional rights violated by ... those elected to uphold and enforce the law.”
This story was originally published May 28, 2020 at 3:17 PM.
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