Riley’s Farm case against Claremont schools case won’t get new appellate hearing
An Oak Glen apple farm co-owner indicated he’s willing to take his lawsuit against Claremont Unified School District all the way to the Supreme Court after his request for an appeals court rehearing went nowhere.
In court documents, James Riley said the district violated his First Amendment rights in 2018 by canceling field trips to his establishment following personal social media posts that school officials and parents called “bigoted,” “homophobic,” “racist” and “obnoxious.”
Riley’s Farm is known for its history re-enactments and apple picking.
In 2020, a U.S. District Court dismissed the lawsuit, but Riley appealed.
In March 2022, a three-judge panel with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said while the school district and officials named in the suit wouldn’t have to pay for damages, the lower court had erred in dismissing Riley’s request that CUSD no longer ban field trips to the farm.
Defendants said the school district has no such policy.
On Friday, April 29, the Circuit Court panel upheld its March findings, denied Riley’s petition to rehear the case and said it would not entertain any further petitions for a rehearing.
“The individual School defendants were entitled to qualified immunity as to the damages claims because the right at issue was not clearly established when the conduct took place,” the panel concluded in the 40-page document issued by U.S. Circuit Judge Sandra Ikuta.
The panel also held that “taking the evidence in the light most favorable to the Riley plaintiffs, the School defendants failed to establish that the School District’s asserted interests in preventing disruption to their operations and curricular design because of parental complaints were so substantial that they outweighed Riley’s free speech interests as a matter of law.”
The case was remanded back to the District Court.
In a blog post on the farm’s website, Riley called the verdict mixed news.
“When the case goes back to the district court, we have a strong chance of making the (Claremont school) district pay for all of our legal costs,” he wrote.
In Friday’s post titled “On to the Supreme Court,” Riley also complained that tweets of “explicit pictures of gender reassignment surgery” would likely be fine with schools no matter how many parents were upset, and compared the current political reality to the Salem witch trials.
“I have the strong sense I should take this to the Supreme Court,” he wrote.
A separate, but highly similar case Riley filed in 2020 against officials in nine school districts is moving forward in U.S. District Court. Defendants in that case come from the Azusa, Bonita, Burbank, Corona-Norco, Culver City, Monrovia, Rialto, San Bernardino City and Walnut Valley school districts.
In 2021, District Court Judge Jesus G. Bernal had paused the second lawsuit while the Claremont case was appealed. Bernal is the same judge who struck down the Claremont suit in 2020.
Last month, Bernal lifted the stay in the multi-district case and ordered the defendants to respond by May 11.