(The Center Square) — A federal appellate court has overturned a ruling against a New York student who was suspended from high school for a controversial social media post.
The ruling by the 2nd Court of Appeals, issued Thursday, sided with First Amendment groups and lawyers for Case Leroy, who was suspended by the Livingston Manor Central School District for an off-campus social media post that mocked the 2020 death of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police officers.
Leroy, who was a senior in 2021, posed with another student’s knee on his neck. He added the caption “Cops got another” when posting the photo on Snapchat. It was posted as a jury had begun to deliberate in the highly publicized trial of Derek Chauvin, a Minnesota police officer charged with Floyd’s murder.
Leroy’s post drew a backlash online, community meetings and protests at his high school and ultimately a week-long suspension.
On behalf of Leroy, the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute and other First Amendment groups sued the school district, arguing that the punishment violated his First Amendment rights. A U.S. District Court ruled against him, holding that the suspension was appropriate because the Snapchat post caused “substantial disruption” in his school.
But the three-member appellate court disagreed in Thursday’s ruling, reversing the judgment and holding that the school violated Leroy’s free speech rights.
“We conclude that Leroy’s off-campus speech fell outside the bounds of the school’s regulatory authority,” Circuit Judge Barrington Parker wrote in the 28-page ruling. “We cannot accept the contention that in today’s world, a social media post made off-campus is equivalent to speech on campus.”
In a separate opinion, Circuit Judge Myrna Perez sided with the majority in their determination that the school had violated Leroy’s First Amendment rights, but cautioned that free speech has limitations.
Perez said the ruling “should not be understood to preclude schools from punishing off-campus student speech in the future, if that speech makes students feel unsafe and deprives them of the ability to learn and participate as equal members of their public-school community, if the speaker intends or is reckless as to that result.”
“In our public schools, off-campus speech has on-campus consequences,” she wrote in the 34-page concurring opinion. That is only becoming more true as students increasingly live their lives and interact with their classmates online,” she wrote. “Schools must then decide in real time, without the time and space enjoyed by courts, how to respond to student speech, including sometimes with punishment.”
The institute, which represented Leroy, said the ruling “reinforces students’ free speech rights and that protecting offensive or unpopular speech remains central to the First Amendment.”
Adam Schulman, Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute’s senior attorney, said the appellate court’s ruling “recognized the limits on American public schools’ authority to police students’ speech outside of school hours or off campus. As the court put it, learning to engagen civil discourse with those with whom we disagree really is ‘an essential feature’ of student education.”
