6th Circuit upholds that lawyer’s free speech retaliation claim was time-barred

A lawyer cannot bring a First Amendment retaliation suit against a police officer who searched his private Facebook records to pursue his criminal trial because he filed the complaint within a year of learning of the reasoning behind the search, not the date of the search itself, a federal appeals court has ruled.

In a July 31 opinion, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld a statute of limitations ruling against Connie Reguli, a civil rights attorney who sued Brentwood, Tennessee, and its police department. Reguli filed civil rights lawsuits against the defendants after investigators obtained a search warrant for her Facebook posts as part of an underlying criminal investigation because of her “critical comments” about police. Evidence from that warrant partly led to Reguli’s conviction for interfering with custody, though that was later overturned and dismissed, according to the opinion.