Filed: May 29, 2013
Latest Update: Mar. 02, 2020
Summary: Case: 12-12908 Date Filed: 05/29/2013 Page: 1 of 61 [PUBLISH] IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT _ No. 12-12908 _ D.C. Docket No. 1:11-cv-21976-UU AMERICAN FEDERATION OF STATE, COUNTY AND MUNICIPAL EMPLOYEES COUNCIL 79, RICHARD FLAMM, Plaintiffs - Appellees, versus RICK SCOTT, in his official capacity as Governor of the State of Florida, Defendant - Appellant. _ Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida _ (May 29, 2013) Before M
Summary: Case: 12-12908 Date Filed: 05/29/2013 Page: 1 of 61 [PUBLISH] IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT _ No. 12-12908 _ D.C. Docket No. 1:11-cv-21976-UU AMERICAN FEDERATION OF STATE, COUNTY AND MUNICIPAL EMPLOYEES COUNCIL 79, RICHARD FLAMM, Plaintiffs - Appellees, versus RICK SCOTT, in his official capacity as Governor of the State of Florida, Defendant - Appellant. _ Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida _ (May 29, 2013) Before MA..
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Case: 12-12908 Date Filed: 05/29/2013 Page: 1 of 61
[PUBLISH]
IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT
________________________
No. 12-12908
________________________
D.C. Docket No. 1:11-cv-21976-UU
AMERICAN FEDERATION OF STATE, COUNTY
AND MUNICIPAL EMPLOYEES COUNCIL 79,
RICHARD FLAMM,
Plaintiffs - Appellees,
versus
RICK SCOTT,
in his official capacity as Governor of the
State of Florida,
Defendant - Appellant.
________________________
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Southern District of Florida
________________________
(May 29, 2013)
Before MARCUS, BLACK and SILER, * Circuit Judges.
MARCUS, Circuit Judge:
*
Honorable Eugene E. Siler, Jr., United States Circuit Judge for the Sixth Circuit, sitting by
designation.
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This appeal presents two closely related issues: first, the extent to which an
executive order that mandates suspicionless drug testing of 85,000 state employees
violates the Fourth Amendment; and, second, the propriety of the district court’s
decision to enjoin the Governor of Florida from testing all 85,000 covered
employees. The district court, confronted with a suspicionless drug testing policy
that almost certainly sweeps far too broadly and hence runs afoul of the Fourth
Amendment in many of its applications, granted relief that also swept too broadly
and captured both the policy’s constitutional applications and its unconstitutional
ones. We therefore vacate the district court’s order and remand for further
proceedings.
Confusion regarding the scope of the relief that the plaintiffs requested has
plagued this lawsuit from its inception in 2011. In that year, Appellant Rick Scott,
the Governor of Florida, issued Executive Order 11-58 (“EO”), which mandated
two types of suspicionless drug testing: random testing of all employees at state
agencies within his control, and pre-employment testing of all applicants to those
agencies. Appellee American Federation of State, County, and Municipal
Employees Council 79 (“Union”), which represents many employees covered by
the EO, sued in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida
to invalidate the EO, and to enjoin its implementation, as unconstitutional under
the Fourth Amendment. Initially, as the Union itself has conceded, its challenge
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was exclusively facial in nature and sought to strike down the entire EO rather than
to limit its applicability. By the summary-judgment stage, however, the Union
urged the district court to construe its complaint as making both a facial and an as-
applied challenge. The Union’s as-applied challenge contended only that the EO
was unconstitutional when applied to employees not occupying safety-sensitive
positions -- a group that the Union estimated to be roughly 60 percent of the
covered employees.
The district court granted summary judgment to the Union and denied
summary judgment to the State. In its order, the district court concluded that the
State’s justifications for testing all of its employees, including those in non-safety-
sensitive positions, were insufficient. The court then turned to the question of what
relief it would grant. The district court granted relief that it described as “as-
applied” but that remained essentially facial in nature: the court invalidated the EO,
and enjoined its implementation, as to all 85,000 current state employees. This
relief covered every single employee and disregarded any distinction between
safety-sensitive and non-safety-sensitive positions.
Yet, as the Supreme Court has established, a party is entitled to facial
invalidation of a law on Fourth Amendment grounds only if the party can
demonstrate that there are no constitutional applications of that law. In this case,
the district court declared the EO unconstitutional as to all current state employees.
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This relief swept too broadly, enjoined both constitutional and unconstitutional
applications of the EO, and did so without examining the specific job categories to
be tested. What the Supreme Court’s case law requires, in contrast, is that the trial
court balance the governmental interests in a suspicionless search against each
particular job category’s expectation of privacy. Among the covered state
employees, for example, are law enforcement personnel who carry firearms as well
as employees tasked with operating heavy machinery or large vehicles -- groups
that the Supreme Court has held, in a line of precedent beginning with Skinner v.
Ry. Labor Execs.’ Ass’n,
489 U.S. 602 (1989), may be drug tested without
individualized suspicion. As to those safety-sensitive employees, the EO’s
application would most likely be constitutional, and, therefore, the district court’s
order cannot stand as written.
The State, however, asks us to do more than vacate and remand. It argues
that the Governor is entitled to summary judgment, and that we should reverse the
district court, because the EO is constitutional as applied to all 85,000 state
employees. At bottom, the State wants us to approve of a drug testing policy of far
greater scope than any ever sanctioned by the Supreme Court or by any of the
courts of appeals. In order to meet its burden of justifying the EO, the State offers
several reasons, stated only at the highest order of abstraction, for why it can drug
test all of its employees without any individualized suspicion. However, the
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Supreme Court has approved of suspicionless drug testing only when the
government has demonstrated heightened interests, such as a serious threat to
public safety, that apply narrowly to specific job categories of employees. Yet
during the summary judgment proceedings, the State refused to provide reasons
that apply narrowly to specific job categories, which undoubtedly hindered the
district court from conducting its balancing calculus at the proper level of
specificity. On remand, the State must meet its burden of demonstrating important
special needs on a job-category-by-category basis. Its current arguments have
failed to convince us to direct summary judgment in its favor.
I.
A.
On March 22, 2011, Governor Scott issued Executive Order 11-58. The EO
directed all state agencies “within the purview of the Governor . . . to provide for
pre-employment drug testing for all prospective new hires and for random drug
testing of all employees within each agency.” The EO further instructed the
agencies to “provide for the potential for any employee . . . to be tested at least
quarterly.” Approximately 85,000 people, or 77 percent of the State’s workforce,
are covered by the EO.
Although the Executive Order does not specify a method of drug testing, the
State indicated in the district court that urinalysis would be the method used to
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implement the testing program. The testing process would afford the person
providing the sample “individual privacy” unless there is reason to believe that a
particular individual intends to alter or substitute the sample. In addition, the
results of the drug tests cannot be used as evidence, obtained in discovery, or
otherwise disclosed in any public or private proceeding.
The EO represented a significant expansion of the State’s employee drug
testing regime. Prior to the EO’s issuance, Florida’s Drug-Free Workplace Act
(“DFWA”), Fla. Stat. § 112.0455, permitted drug testing in more limited instances.
State agencies were authorized to test: job applicants to “safety-sensitive
position[s],” meaning “any position, including a supervisory or management
position, in which a drug impairment would constitute an immediate and direct
threat to public health or safety,” § 112.0455(5)(f) & (m); current employees, if the
employer had reasonable suspicion; current employees, if the test was “conducted
as part of a routinely scheduled employee fitness-for-duty medical examination”;
and current employees who entered “an employee assistance program for drug-
related problems.” See § 112.0455(7)(a)-(d). This version of the statute notably did
not provide for random suspicionless testing of any current employees, even those
employed in safety-sensitive positions.
Other statutes or administrative regulations provided for suspicionless
testing of current employees in specific departments. The Department of
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Corrections (“DOC”), for instance, provided for random suspicionless testing of its
employees. See Fla. Stat. § 944.474. The Department of Juvenile Justice (“DJJ”)
also required random suspicionless drug testing of its employees. The Department
of Transportation (“DOT”) and the Department of Environmental Protection
(“DEP”), meanwhile, required random suspicionless testing of their safety-
sensitive employees, particularly those who held commercial driver’s licenses.
In 2012, the Florida Legislature amended the Drug-Free Workplace Act and
substantially broadened it. The current version of Fla. Stat. § 112.0455 permits
random testing of all employees at three-month intervals, see § 112.0455(7)(c)
(2012), and expands the definition of “job applicant” to cover all job applicants,
see § 112.0455(5)(f) (2012). In essence, the current version of the DFWA
authorizes what the EO mandates.
The text of the Executive Order offers several justifications for this
sweeping policy, including, among others, that: (1) “the State, as an employer, has
an obligation to maintain discipline, health, and safety in the workplace”; (2)
“illegal drug use has an adverse [e]ffect on job performance,” including the risk of
absenteeism, greater burden on state health benefit programs, and a decline in
productivity; and (3) drug use poses a risk to the public, which “interacts daily with
state employees.”
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Prior to the issuance of the EO, the State had collected data from random
drug testing of job applicants and employees at three departments -- the
Department of Transportation, the Department of Juvenile Justice, and the
Department of Corrections. Random testing at DOT and DJJ yielded positive
results in less than one percent of cases between 2008 and 2011; random testing at
DOC produced positive results in less than one percent of cases in 2008 and 2009,
then increased to 2.4 and 2.5 percent in 2010 and 2011. The State presented this
data as evidence that there was a preexisting drug problem among the state
employee population.
B.
On May 31, 2011, before any agency implemented the EO, the Union filed
suit, alleging that the EO violated the Fourth Amendment. Using the terminology
of a facial challenge, the Union described its suit as “an action . . . for a
preliminary injunction and a permanent injunction against the Governor of the
State of Florida, ordering him to cease, or not implement, all employee drug-
testing mandated by his Executive Order Number 11-58,” and also for “declaratory
judgment declaring that the drug-testing regime mandated by Executive Order 11-
58 violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.” Compl. ¶ 1. The gravamen
of the complaint was that “[t]he Supreme Court of the United States has held that
suspicionless drug-testing by the government is an unreasonable search violative of
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the Fourth Amendment, except under certain special circumstances,” none of
which applied to the EO. Compl. ¶ 11. More precisely, the EO “violate[d] the
Fourth Amendment . . . because it command[ed] state agencies to conduct random,
suspicionless searches of all employees, without limiting the searches in any way
to employees in safety-sensitive positions where there is a concrete danger of real
harm.” Compl. ¶ 13.
Regarding its standing, the Union averred that it represented more than
50,000 employees at the agencies covered by the EO. Its members were subject
both to the random testing requirement for current employees as well as the pre-
employment testing requirement for new hires because “employees represented by
[the Union] who seek a promotion to another job are considered new employees.”
Compl. ¶ 15. Thus, the Union “sue[d] on its own behalf” as well as “in its
organizational capacity on behalf of those state employees it represent[ed].”
Compl. ¶ 16.
In the final section of the complaint, the Union reiterated its request for
facial relief. The Union first asked the district court to declare “that Defendant’s
Executive Order 11-58 is quashed because it violates the right of the people to be
free from unreasonable searches, under the Fourth Amendment.” The Union
further urged the district court to issue a permanent injunction ordering “the
Defendant [to] immediately direct all agencies and persons affected by
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Defendant’s Executive Order 11-58 to cease all drug-testing implemented in
compliance with the order.” Compl. at 6-7.
C.
The parties filed cross motions for summary judgment. The Union argued
that the Executive Order was unconstitutional because it failed to separate safety-
sensitive from non-safety-sensitive positions and thus moved the district court to
issue both a declaratory judgment declaring that the EO violated the Fourth
Amendment and a permanent injunction barring the EO’s implementation.
Notably, at this stage, the Union began recasting its complaint in the
terminology of an as-applied challenge. The Union stressed that it “challenge[d]
only the new drug-testing regime that tests the rest of the State’s workers [not
covered by the then-current version of Fla. Stat. § 112.0455] -- those not suspected
of drug abuse and those who don’t hold safety-sensitive jobs.” And, in its
opposition to the State’s cross-motion for summary judgment and its reply brief,
the Union expressly insisted it had made an as-applied challenge. The Union
argued that “the Complaint, fairly read, clearly put the Governor on notice that [the
Union] was bringing both a facial and as-applied challenge,” and that its as-applied
challenge contended that the statute was “unconstitutional as applied to [Union]
bargaining unit members who are not reasonably suspected of drug abuse and who
are not in safety-sensitive positions.” The Union further clarified that, for purposes
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of its as-applied challenge, it was “not challenging drug-testing of those in safety-
sensitive positions.”
In support of its motion, the State argued: (1) that the Union lacked standing;
(2) that the Union could not succeed on what the State maintained was a facial
challenge to the Executive Order; (3) that, on the merits, the EO was constitutional
because individuals consented to the test; or, alternatively, (4) that the EO was
constitutional because the State had a special need justifying suspicionless drug
testing. In its special-needs analysis, the State offered its interest in a safe,
productive, and efficient workplace as the primary need justifying the EO. The
State expressly declined to specify which groups of employees presented
heightened safety concerns, instead arguing generally that “even if safety concerns
were the only permissible justification, the notion that only intoxicated employees
with certain duties present a danger to others . . . is untenable.” Thus, according to
the State, the proffered safety need applied across the board and to all employees:
An employee need not drive a train, carry a gun, or interdict drugs to
present a safety risk. Even a desk-bound clerk . . . may become violent
with other employees or the public, may present a danger when
driving a car in the workplace parking lot, or may exercise impaired
judgment when encountering any of the myriad hazards that exist in
the workplace environment . . . .
The State also asserted that the privacy interests of state employees were
diminished for several reasons. First, drug testing among private employers had
become common. Second, Florida had a tradition of open government. Finally, the
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policy was clearly announced, so employees could not have any expectation of
privacy. As for the Union’s as-applied challenge, the State declined to meet it
head-on. Instead, it argued only that the district court should reject the Union’s
attempt to recast its pleadings because “prior to the about-face in its [o]pposition
[to defendant’s motion for summary judgment], Plaintiff repeatedly relied on the
solely facial nature of its claim.” According to the State, therefore, the district
court should consider and reject only the Union’s facial challenge.
D.
On April 25, 2012, the district court granted summary judgment to the
Union and, in turn, denied the State’s motion. After finding that the Union had
standing to challenge the Executive Order, 1 the district court conducted the special-
needs balancing test established in Skinner and weighed the State’s asserted public
interests against the employees’ privacy interests. The district court first
determined that the public interests asserted were “notably broad and general
compared to the interests that the Supreme Court . . . held justify suspicionless
drug testing.” The court then rejected the State’s assertion that state employees
possessed a diminished privacy interest. The district court therefore concluded that
the EO was unconstitutional.
1
Scott has not appealed the district court’s determination that the Union had standing to
challenge the EO, and we are satisfied that the Union has standing to mount this challenge.
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The district court turned to crafting the remedy. Although the State argued
that the Union had mounted exclusively a facial challenge, the court pointed out
that the Union had conceded that the Fourth Amendment permitted drug testing of
state employees in safety-sensitive positions. However, the district court then
characterized the Union’s challenge “as consistent with an ‘as-applied’ challenge .
. . . [that] asserts at most that the EO cannot be constitutionally applied to any
current employee at a covered agency.” (Emphasis added.) Accordingly, the
district court granted far more sweeping relief than was consistent with the Union’s
concession. The Court granted a declaratory judgment holding the EO
unconstitutional and issued an injunction coextensive with that declaration, which
barred drug testing of “both Union and non-Union employees . . . . currently
employed at covered agencies” as of the date of the district court’s order. In short,
the district court struck down the EO insofar as it covered all 85,000 current state
employees. The only thing that the judgment and injunction did not address was
the application of the EO to “pre-employment testing of non-current employees,” a
group the district court labeled “prospective new hires,” and “the random testing of
those hired after the issuance of the EO.”
The State timely appealed.
II.
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Summary judgment is appropriate where “the movant shows that there is no
genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a
matter of law.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 56(a). We review a district court’s grant of
summary judgment de novo, viewing the facts and drawing all reasonable
inferences in the light most favorable to the non-moving party. Moore ex rel.
Moore v. Reese,
637 F.3d 1220, 1231 (11th Cir. 2011). We review the decision to
grant a permanent injunction for abuse of discretion but review the district court’s
underlying legal conclusions de novo. See Alabama v. Ctrs. for Medicare &
Medicaid Servs.,
674 F.3d 1241, 1244 n.2 (11th Cir. 2012).
A.
The parties first dispute whether the relief the district court granted in this
case was facial or as-applied in nature. Although the boundary between these two
forms of relief is not always clearly or easily demarcated, the district court’s
decision to strike down the EO and enjoin its implementation as to all 85,000
current employees has the essential characteristics of facial relief.
From the outset, the Union mounted a facial challenge to the Executive
Order. That much is apparent from the face of the complaint. We look to the scope
of the relief requested to determine whether a challenge is facial or as-applied in
nature. See Doe v. Reed,
130 S. Ct. 2811, 2817 (2010). The heart of the Union’s
requested remedy was two-fold: first, that the district court broadly declare “that
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Defendant’s Executive Order 11-58 is quashed because it violates the right of the
people to be free from unreasonable searches, under the Fourth Amendment”; and,
second, that the district court issue an injunction ordering “the Defendant [to]
immediately direct all agencies and persons affected by Defendant’s Executive
Order 11-58 to cease all drug-testing implemented in compliance with the order.”
Compl. at 6-7 (emphasis added). There can be no doubt that this relief would be
facial in nature. And, indeed, the Union expressly maintained that its challenge was
facial prior to filing a motion for summary judgment.
However, the Union began requesting both facial and as-applied relief at the
summary-judgment stage. In requesting as-applied relief, the Union explained that
it “challenge[d] only the new drug-testing regime that tests . . . those not suspected
of drug abuse and those who don’t hold safety-sensitive jobs,” and that it was “not
challenging drug-testing of those in safety-sensitive positions.” The Union
identified the non-safety-sensitive category of employees to be roughly 60 percent
of all employees covered by the EO.
Insofar as the Union mounted a facial challenge to the Executive Order --
and it surely did that -- it had to meet an especially demanding standard. “A facial
challenge, as distinguished from an as-applied challenge, seeks to invalidate a
statute or regulation itself.” United States v. Frandsen,
212 F.3d 1231, 1235 (11th
Cir. 2000). “[W]hen a plaintiff mounts a facial challenge to a statute or regulation,
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the plaintiff bears the burden of proving that the law could never be applied in a
constitutional manner.” DA Mortg., Inc. v. City of Miami Beach,
486 F.3d 1254,
1262 (11th Cir. 2007). Put another way, “the challenger must establish that no set
of circumstances exists under which the Act would be valid.” United States v.
Salerno,
481 U.S. 739, 745 (1987). The Supreme Court reaffirmed Salerno’s
validity as recently as 2010, see United States v. Stevens,
130 S. Ct. 1577, 1587
(2010) (citing
Salerno, 481 U.S. at 745), and, just last year, a panel of this Court
reiterated that the strict “no set of circumstances” test is the proper standard for
evaluating a facial challenge. GeorgiaCarry.Org, Inc. v. Georgia,
687 F.3d 1244,
1255 & n.19 (11th Cir. 2012).
Salerno also applies when a court grants relief that is quasi-facial in nature --
that is, relief that reaches beyond the plaintiffs in a case. In Doe v. Reed, for
instance, the Supreme Court considered a challenge that a state law violated the
First Amendment when applied to referendum
petitions. 130 S. Ct. at 2817. The
Court noted that characterizing the challenge as either facial or as-applied was
problematic because the challenge “obviously ha[d] characteristics of both: The
claim [wa]s ‘as applied’ in the sense that it d[id] not seek to strike the PRA in all
its applications, but only to the extent it covers referendum petitions. The claim
[wa]s ‘facial’ in that it [wa]s not limited to plaintiffs’ particular case . . . .”
Id.
When a plaintiff brings this sort of quasi-facial challenge, “[t]he label is not what
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matters.”
Id. Where “an injunction . . . reach[es] beyond the particular
circumstances of these plaintiffs,” it “must therefore satisfy [the Supreme Court’s]
standards for a facial challenge to the extent of that reach.”
Id.
Prior to considering the propriety of the Union’s facial challenge, the district
court correctly attempted to construe the Union’s complaint as making a more
limited, as-applied challenge to the EO. The State objects that the district court
could not have construed the Union’s suit as an as-applied challenge at all because
the Union’s complaint requested only facial relief and the Union insisted during
discovery that it was mounting a facial challenge. This objection is unconvincing.
Ordinarily, it is true that, “[a]t the summary judgment stage, the proper procedure
for plaintiffs to assert a new claim is to amend the complaint in accordance with
Fed. R. Civ. P. 15(a). A plaintiff may not amend her complaint through argument
in a brief opposing summary judgment” or one advocating summary judgment.
Gilmour v. Gates, McDonald & Co.,
382 F.3d 1312, 1315 (11th Cir. 2004). In this
case, however, the Union was not stating a new claim, only clarifying the scope of
its desired remedy. As the Supreme Court has explained, “the distinction between
facial and as-applied challenges is not so well defined that it has some automatic
effect or that it must always control the pleadings and disposition in every case
involving a constitutional challenge. The distinction . . . goes to the breadth of the
remedy employed by the Court, not what must be pleaded in a complaint.” Citizens
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United v. Fed. Election Comm’n,
558 U.S. 310, 331 (2010); see Jacobs v. Fla. Bar,
50 F.3d 901, 905 n.17 (11th Cir. 1995) (we are not bound by a party’s
characterization of the complaint as facial, but rather look to whether “the
complaint sets forth a cause of action for an as-applied challenge”).
As a general matter, courts strongly disfavor facial challenges, and for good
reason:
Claims of facial invalidity often rest on speculation. As a
consequence, they raise the risk of premature interpretation of statutes
on the basis of factually barebones records. Facial challenges also run
contrary to the fundamental principle of judicial restraint that courts
should neither anticipate a question of constitutional law in advance of
the necessity of deciding it nor formulate a rule of constitutional law
broader than is required by the precise facts to which it is to be
applied. Finally, facial challenges threaten to short circuit the
democratic process by preventing laws embodying the will of the
people from being implemented in a manner consistent with the
Constitution.
Wash. State Grange v. Wash. State Republican Party,
552 U.S. 442, 450-51 (2008)
(citations and internal quotation marks omitted). Thus, courts construe a plaintiff’s
challenge, if possible, to be as-applied. See
Jacobs, 50 F.3d at 905 n.17; see also
Stupak-Thrall v. United States,
89 F.3d 1269, 1288 (6th Cir. 1996) (Boggs, J.,
dissenting) (“[U]nless a plaintiff expressly disavows an ‘as-applied’ challenge, the
complaint that a regulation is invalid should be construed, if possible, as an as-
applied challenge.”).
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However, despite explicitly saying that it was granting only as-applied relief,
the district court in this case granted what effectively amounted to facial relief by
declaring the Executive Order unconstitutional and enjoining its application to all
85,000 current employees. As the district court itself acknowledged, the concession
that transformed the lawsuit into an as-applied challenge was the Union’s
admission that the Fourth Amendment permitted drug tests of state employees in
safety-sensitive positions. Yet the district court did not follow that reasoning to its
necessary conclusion, which was that the proper scope of the as-applied challenge -
- and the scope of the relief that it could have granted based on the Union’s motion
for summary judgment -- was limited to those employees not occupying safety-
sensitive positions. Instead, the district court characterized the Union’s concession
“as consistent with an ‘as-applied’ challenge . . . . [that] asserts at most that the EO
cannot be constitutionally applied to any current employee at a covered agency.”
(Emphasis added.) In doing so, the district court attached an as-applied label to
what essentially amounted to a facial challenge concerning all 85,000 current state
employees.
This led the district court to grant both a declaratory judgment and a
corresponding injunction that were too broad. In determining the scope of its relief,
the court began by dividing the individuals subject to the EO into three groups: (1)
employees at the covered agencies prior to the issuance of district court’s order; (2)
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“prospective new hires,” which meant “individuals who are not currently employed
at covered agencies”; and (3) employees at the covered agencies hired after the
district court’s order. The district court then granted the Union declaratory
judgment declaring the EO unconstitutional, and an injunction that mirrored the
scope of that declaration, as to the first group. The court stated that its order left
“unresolved” the question of the EO’s constitutionality with regard to the latter two
groups, since “[t]he Union ma[de] no claims as to the constitutionality of the EO as
it relates to pre-employment testing of non-current employees, or the random
testing of those hired after the issuance of the EO.” This limitation, however, did
not transform the district court’s relief from facial to as-applied.
As we’ve said, the line between facial and as-applied relief is a fluid one,
and many constitutional challenges may occupy an intermediate position on the
spectrum between purely as-applied relief and complete facial invalidation. The
Supreme Court itself has weighed challenges with both facial and as-applied
characteristics, see, e.g.,
Doe, 130 S. Ct. at 2817, and perhaps the best
understanding of constitutional challenges is that “[t]here is no single distinctive
category of facial, as opposed to as-applied, litigation.” Richard H. Fallon, Jr., As-
Applied and Facial Challenges and Third-Party Standing, 113 Harv. L. Rev. 1321,
1321 (2000). As both parties acknowledged at oral argument, the district court’s
order has characteristics of both facial and as-applied relief. On the one hand, it
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reaches far beyond the scope of the Union’s as-applied challenge and encompasses
all current state employees. On the other hand, the district court did not invalidate
the EO in its entirety.
Nonetheless, we conclude that the district court granted what effectively
amounted to facial relief -- or, at the very least, relief that had enough
characteristics of facial relief to demand satisfaction of Salerno’s rigorous
standard. The essential point is that the district court invalidated the EO across the
board covering all 85,000 state employees, the overwhelming majority of those
subject to the EO. The scope of the district court’s judgment is extremely broad
and, notably, its relief was not limited in any way by the concession the Union
itself made: “[O]n March 22, 2011 (the date of promulgation) there was at least
one employee . . . who held a high-risk, safety-sensitive job, and was subject to EO
11-58. And we admit that the Fourth Amendment does not bar the random drug
testing of government employees in high-risk, safety-sensitive jobs.”
Notwithstanding that concession, the district court’s judgment and injunction bar
the State from testing that employee and, indeed, any other current employee who,
for example, occupies a law enforcement position that requires carrying a firearm.
Nor does the district court’s cutoff of the scope of its judgment and the
accompanying injunction transform that relief into as-applied relief. The district
court invalidated the Executive Order and enjoined its implementation as to the
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vast majority of individuals covered by the EO. To be sure, the district court did
not declare unconstitutional or enjoin the implementation of the entirety of the EO.
But the district court’s decision not to cover pre-employment testing of prospective
new hires does not alter our view that the relief it did grant was facial as to all
85,000 current employees. If a statute has two distinct provisions, and a court
strikes down one as unconstitutional (and indeed, one that covers so many
employees), we would not say that the relief was as-applied simply because a part
of the statute remains. Rather, we would say that, as to the provision the court
struck down, the plaintiff obtained facial relief. See
Doe, 130 S. Ct. at 2817. 2 Here,
that is precisely what the Union received. Rather than conducting any kind of job-
category-by-category inquiry, and narrowly tailoring its decision to the precise
contours of the constitutional violation, the district court facially invalidated the
provision of the Executive Order that provides “for random drug testing of all
employees within each agency.”
B.
Having established that the district court granted facial relief, the essential
question becomes whether that relief could meet Salerno’s demanding standard. To
uphold the scope of the relief, we would have to be convinced that the State could
2
The alternative is untenable. If a challenge to a statute only became facial in nature when it
attacked every provision within a statute, then any moderately clever drafter could insulate an
unconstitutional statute from a facial challenge simply by adding a provision to the statute that
was clearly constitutional.
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never constitutionally require any of the 85,000 current state employees protected
by the injunction to submit to a suspicionless drug test. But the answer, plainly, is
that there are some (how many is unclear) current state employees as to whom
suspicionless drug testing is constitutionally permissible. This conclusion
ineluctably follows from the line of Supreme Court precedent beginning with
Skinner, which held that the Fourth Amendment permits suspicionless drug testing
of certain safety-sensitive categories of employees -- for instance, employees who
operate or pilot large vehicles, or law enforcement officers who carry firearms in
the course of duty.
The Fourth Amendment protects “[t]he right of the people to be secure in
their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and
seizures,” U.S. Const. amend. IV, and applies to the states through the Due Process
Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. See City of Ontario v. Quon,
130 S. Ct.
2619, 2624 (2010). Testing a urine sample, which “can reveal a host of private
medical facts about an employee,” and which entails a process that “itself
implicates privacy interests,” is a search.
Skinner, 489 U.S. at 617; see also
Chandler v. Miller,
520 U.S. 305, 313 (1997). The basic question we are required
to answer when confronted with a drug-testing policy is whether this search is
reasonable.
Chandler, 520 U.S. at 313. While “[i]n the criminal context,
reasonableness usually requires a showing of probable cause” to obtain a search
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warrant, that standard is “unsuited to determining the reasonableness of
administrative searches where the ‘Government seeks to prevent the development
of hazardous conditions.’” Bd. of Educ. v. Earls,
536 U.S. 822, 828 (2002)
(quoting Nat’l Treasury Emps. Union v. Von Raab,
489 U.S. 656, 667-68 (1989)).
The default rule in this context, therefore, is that “[t]o be reasonable under
the Fourth Amendment, a search ordinarily must be based on individualized
suspicion of wrongdoing.”
Chandler, 520 U.S. at 313. While individualized
suspicion is the normal requirement, “particularized exceptions to the main rule are
sometimes warranted based on ‘special needs, beyond the normal need for law
enforcement.’”
Id. (quoting Skinner, 489 U.S. at 619). When the government
alleges that special needs justify this Fourth Amendment intrusion, “courts must
undertake a context-specific inquiry, examining closely the competing private and
public interests advanced by the parties.”
Id. at 314. “In limited circumstances,
where the privacy interests implicated by the search are minimal, and where an
important governmental interest furthered by the intrusion would be placed in
jeopardy by a requirement of individualized suspicion, a search may be reasonable
despite the absence of such suspicion.”
Skinner, 489 U.S. at 624.
Therefore, the test we apply is a job-category-by-category balancing of “the
individual’s privacy expectations against the Government’s interests,” Von
Raab,
489 U.S. at 665, with other relevant factors being “the character of the intrusion” --
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particularly whether the collection method affords a modicum of privacy, see
Vernonia Sch. Dist. 47J v. Acton,
515 U.S. 646, 658 (1995) -- and the efficacy of
the testing regime, see
Chandler, 520 U.S. at 319-20. At times, the Supreme Court
has described the interests justifying suspicionless drug testing as “compelling.”
See Von
Raab, 489 U.S. at 670;
Skinner, 489 U.S. at 628. In Vernonia, the Court
clarified that “[i]t is a mistake, however, to think that the phrase ‘compelling state
interest,’ in the Fourth Amendment context, describes a fixed, minimum quantum
of governmental concern,” and therefore we cannot “dispose of a case by
answering in isolation the question: Is there a compelling state interest
here?” 515
U.S. at 661. Rather, a compelling interest is one “important enough to justify the
particular search at hand, in light of other factors that show the search to be
relatively intrusive upon a genuine expectation of privacy.”
Id.
The Supreme Court has had five occasions to evaluate suspicionless drug
testing policies in the last twenty-five years. We therefore know the kinds of
interests that are important enough to subject certain limited categories of
individuals to suspicionless drug tests, and, moreover, we know that some of the
85,000 current state employees fall within those categories. In Skinner, the
Supreme Court established that the government has a compelling need to test
railroad employees. In that case, the Federal Railroad Administration (“FRA”)
required suspicionless drug testing of workers involved in railroad accidents. 489
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U.S. at 606. As for the first factor in the balancing test, the FRA’s interest, the
Court’s inquiry focused intently on the special characteristics of the railroad
industry, where on-the-job intoxication was “a significant problem” that had
resulted in “21 significant train accidents” in a ten-year period.
Id. at 607. On the
other side of the ledger, the Court reasoned that “the expectations of privacy of
covered employees [we]re diminished by reason of their participation in an
industry that is regulated pervasively to ensure safety.”
Id. at 627. As the Court
pointed out, railroad “employees ha[d] long been a principal focus of regulatory
concern,” with various federal laws subjecting railroad employees’ physical fitness
to testing and regulation. See
id. at 627-28. The two other factors were the
character of the intrusion and the efficacy of the policy. The FRA’s urine testing
was not overly intrusive because it did not require direct observation,
id. at 626,
and testing was effective because it “deterr[ed] employees engaged in safety-
sensitive tasks from using controlled substances or alcohol in the first place.”
Id. at
629; accord
id. at 631-32. In light of these factors, most notably the serious risks to
public safety implicated by this specific category of employees, the Court upheld
the constitutionality of the FRA’s policy. See
id. at 633. The principle we draw
from Skinner is that government “employees . . . engaged in safety-sensitive
tasks,”
id. at 620, particularly those involved with the operation of heavy
machinery or means of mass transit, may be subject to suspicionless drug testing.
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In Von Raab, the Supreme Court identified several other job categories that
a suspicionless drug testing policy may cover. At issue in that case was the United
States Customs Service’s required urinalysis testing for three job categories: first,
those directly involved in drug interdiction; second, those who carried firearms;
and third, those who handled classified
material. 489 U.S. at 660-61. The Court
began by identifying the government’s special needs with regard to the first two
categories.
Id. at 668. Customs employees responsible for drug interdiction were
“exposed to th[e] criminal element and to the controlled substances it s[ought] to
smuggle into the country”; the Customs Service was concerned not only about
those employees’ “physical safety” but also the risk of bribery or corruption. See
id. at 669. Thus, the Supreme Court found that “the Government ha[d] a
compelling interest in ensuring that front-line interdiction personnel [we]re
physically fit, and ha[d] unimpeachable integrity and judgment.”
Id. at 670. Similar
logic applied to those who carried firearms. Employees “who may use deadly force
plainly discharge duties fraught with such risks of injury to others that even a
momentary lapse of attention can have disastrous consequences.”
Id. (internal
quotation marks omitted).
As for the privacy interests implicated by the search, the Supreme Court
began by noting that “certain forms of public employment may diminish privacy
expectations even with respect to such personal searches.”
Id. at 671. The Court
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explained that, “[u]nlike most private citizens or government employees in general,
employees involved in drug interdiction reasonably should expect effective inquiry
into their fitness and probity. Much the same is true of employees who are required
to carry firearms.”
Id. at 672. “Because successful performance of their duties
depends uniquely on their judgment and dexterity, these employees cannot
reasonably expect to keep from the Service personal information that bears directly
on their fitness,” and thus their privacy could not “outweigh the Government’s
compelling interests in safety and in the integrity of our borders.”
Id.
As for employees who handled classified information, however, the Court
remanded. While noting that the protection of “truly sensitive information” is
“compelling,”
id. at 677, the Court questioned the Customs Service’s designation
of several classes of employees -- for instance, baggage clerks and messengers --
as belonging to this category. See
id. at 678. Since the Court could not determine
“whether the Service ha[d] defined this category of employees more broadly than
is necessary,” it remanded for the lower courts to determine more precisely which
employees truly dealt with sensitive information. See
id.
The Supreme Court next approved of suspicionless drug testing in a far
different context than government employment: schools. The Court upheld the
constitutionality of two schools’ policies of randomly drug testing student athletes,
Vernonia, 515 U.S. at 648, and students participating in competitive extracurricular
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activities,
Earls, 536 U.S. at 825. The Supreme Court found that there was a special
need in the public school context, where teachers were responsible for their young
charges. See
Vernonia, 515 U.S. at 661 (“Deterring drug use by our Nation’s
schoolchildren is at least as important as enhancing efficient enforcement of the
Nation’s laws against the importation of drugs . . . or deterring drug use by
engineers and trainmen . . . .”);
Earls, 536 U.S. at 829. As for the students’ privacy
interests, the Court noted that the students by definition were “(1) children, who (2)
have been committed to the temporary custody of the State as schoolmaster.”
Vernonia, 515 U.S. at 654. The State, acting in loco parentis, exercised “a degree
of supervision and control that could not be exercised over free adults.”
Id. at 655;
see
Earls, 536 U.S. at 831. Those diminished privacy interests could not overcome
the government’s important interests in protecting children from drug use. See
Vernonia, 515 U.S. at 665;
Earls, 536 U.S. at 838.
In contrast to the preceding cases, the Supreme Court rejected a Georgia
statute that required all candidates for certain state offices to submit to a drug test
at a time of their choosing prior to the election. See
Chandler, 520 U.S. at 309-10.
Georgia attempted to justify its policy based on “the incompatibility of unlawful
drug use with holding high state office,” contending that illegal drug use “draws
into question an official’s judgment and integrity” and “jeopardizes the discharge
of public functions.”
Id. at 318. The Court dismissed these broad and general
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rationales, finding “[n]otably lacking . . . any indication of a concrete danger
demanding departure from the Fourth Amendment’s main rule.”
Id. at 318-19.
Unlike the railroad employees in Skinner or the law enforcement officers in Von
Raab, “th[e Georgia] officials typically d[id] not perform high-risk, safety-sensitive
tasks, and the required certification immediately aid[ed] no interdiction effort.”
Id.
at 321-22. Worse still, Georgia’s testing program was not even well-crafted to
detect drug use, since the candidates themselves scheduled the drug test and could
easily evade a positive result.
Id. at 319-20. The Supreme Court therefore had little
trouble declaring this policy unconstitutional.
Although this Court recently has addressed the constitutionality of
suspicionless drug testing in a different context, see Lebron v. Sec’y, Fla. Dep’t of
Children & Families,
710 F.3d 1202, 1218 (11th Cir. 2013) (affirming a
preliminary injunction barring suspicionless testing of welfare recipients), we have
not considered the propriety of testing current or potential government employees
since Chandler v. Miller,
73 F.3d 1543 (11th Cir. 1996), rev’d,
520 U.S. 305. Our
sister circuits, however, have confronted a wide variety of drug testing policies and
have identified several other safety-sensitive job categories. In cases similar to
Skinner, the courts of appeals have upheld suspicionless drug testing of categories
of employees whose work involves heavy machinery or the operation of large
vehicles, such as planes, trains, buses, or boats. Thus, although Skinner itself
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addressed railroad employees, the courts of appeals have extended its logic to those
involved in the operation of aircraft. See, e.g., Bluestein v. Skinner,
908 F.2d 451,
457 (9th Cir. 1990); Nat’l Fed’n of Fed. Emps. v. Cheney,
884 F.2d 603, 610-11
(D.C. Cir. 1989). Another category -- a natural extension of the Supreme Court’s
holding in Von Raab -- encompasses police officers, see Carroll v. City of
Westminster,
233 F.3d 208, 213 (4th Cir. 2000), correctional officers who interact
with parolees or inmates in a prison, see Int’l Union v. Winters,
385 F.3d 1003,
1013 (6th Cir. 2004), and firefighters, see Hatley v. Dep’t of the Navy,
164 F.3d
602, 604 (Fed. Cir. 1998).
The crucial point is that, to affirm the district court’s declaration and
injunction in this case, we would have to find that none of the 85,000 current
employees covered by the district court’s relief belong to the special-needs
categories identified by the Supreme Court. However, the Union’s own
submissions belie this. Indeed, the Union itself observed that, “[o]f the
approximately 85,000 employees in 2010, 33,052 of them . . . served in arguably
safety-sensitive positions.” More precisely, during discovery, the Union asked the
State to identify:
• “How many employees affected by EO 11-58 regularly carry firearms on the
job?” (Interrogatory 16)
• “How many employees affected by EO 11-58 are sworn law enforcement
officers?” (Interrogatory 17)
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• “How many employees affected by . . . EO 11-58 regularly interact on the
job with detainees in the correctional system?” (Interrogatory 18)
• “How many employees affected by EO 11-58 regularly interact on the job
with primary or secondary school students?” (Interrogatory 19)
• “How many employees affected by EO 11-58 regularly work as mass transit
operators?” (Interrogatory 20)
• “How many employees affected by EO 11-58 regularly work as
transportation safety inspectors?” (Interrogatory 21)
The State provided fairly detailed figures in its responses, including, for example,
the following categories of employees who carry firearms: 157 employees in the
Department of Business & Professional Regulation, 146 inspectors in the
Department of Corrections (along with another 1,088 employees who were
authorized but not required to carry firearms), 136 employees in the Department of
Environmental Protection, and 23 in the Department of Military Affairs. Based on
the holding in Von Raab, it is apparent that, at least as to these employees, the EO
is very likely constitutionally applicable. The State further identified several
distinct categories of employees who operate heavy machinery or large vehicles,
with almost a thousand working for the Department of Transportation alone.
Skinner makes it likely that the State also may subject these, or at least some of
these, employees to suspicionless drug testing. Yet by extending the declaratory
judgment and injunction to all current employees, the district court effectively
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disregarded these portions of the record and barred testing of the safety-sensitive
employees included among the 85,000 current employees.
Under Salerno, the EO could not possibly be unconstitutional as to all
current employees, and the district court’s order therefore cannot “satisfy [the
Supreme Court’s] standards for a facial challenge to the extent of [the order’s]
reach.”
Doe, 130 S. Ct. at 2817. Since it is well-settled that a district court abuses
its discretion when it grants relief that is improperly or even unnecessarily broad,
see Alley v. U.S. Dep’t of Health & Human Servs.,
590 F.3d 1195, 1205 (11th Cir.
2009), we vacate and remand the judgment and the injunction for the district court
to more precisely tailor its relief to the extent the Executive Order may be
unconstitutional.
Nonetheless, the Union maintains that the scope of the injunction was proper
anyhow and fell well within the district court’s broad discretion. In fact, the Union
continues to assert that the court “was also within its discretion to award facial
relief” because the Union had demonstrated that no set of circumstances exists
under which the EO would be valid. This places the Union’s arguments in palpable
tension. On the one hand, it concedes that suspicionless drug testing of safety-
sensitive employees would be constitutional. On the other hand, it maintains that
the EO is facially unconstitutional.
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The way that the Union squares the circle is by misapplying Salerno’s “no
set of circumstances” test. According to the Union, the Executive Order requires
suspicionless drug testing of all employees, and “there are no circumstances in
which suspicionless drug testing of all employees and applicants would be
constitutional.” Therefore, the EO fails across the board. Under the Union’s
interpretation of Salerno’s test, a single application of the EO means its application
to all employees. But under Salerno and our precedents, see, e.g., Harris v.
Mexican Specialty Foods, Inc.,
564 F.3d 1301, 1313 (11th Cir. 2009) (“Th[e] mere
possibility of a constitutional application is enough to defeat a facial challenge to
[a] statute.”), a single “application” of the EO must mean the suspicionless drug
test of a single employee. The EO is facially valid, in other words, if the Fourth
Amendment permits at least one covered employee to be tested. The Union’s
position completely inverts Salerno and renders a facial attack, far from being the
“most difficult” of
challenges, 481 U.S. at 745, the easiest to make. To prevail
under the Union’s version of Salerno, the Union needs to show only one employee
as to whom suspicionless drug testing is unconstitutional. Then, it would follow,
the EO is unconstitutional as a whole because there is no way that testing of all
employees is constitutional.3 Under the correct understanding of Salerno, we are
3
The Union cites only one case in support of this understanding of facial challenges: Baron v.
City of Hollywood,
93 F. Supp. 2d 1337 (S.D. Fla. 2000). The district court in Baron accepted an
argument essentially identical to the one the Union makes in this case, see
id. at 1339, and
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compelled to conclude that the EO is not facially invalid since safety-sensitive
employees may be subjected to suspicionless drug testing.
The Union offers another argument: that the district court was required to
facially invalidate the EO because otherwise the court would have been “put in the
untenable position of having to rewrite” it. The Union claims that the Supreme
Court’s case law cautions against partial invalidation and cites Ayotte v. Planned
Parenthood of N. New England,
546 U.S. 320 (2006). Ayotte, however, hardly
supports this proposition. As the Supreme Court stated in that case, “the ‘normal
rule’ is that ‘partial, rather than facial, invalidation is the required course,’ such
that a ‘statute may . . . be declared invalid to the extent that it reaches too far, but
otherwise left intact.’”
Id. at 329 (quoting Brockett v. Spokane Arcades, Inc.,
472
U.S. 491, 504 (1985)). In Sabri v. United States, the Court identified the “few
settings” in which it had “recognized the validity of facial attacks alleging
overbreadth (though not necessarily using that term)”: free speech, the right to
travel, abortion rights (the category to which Ayotte itself belongs), and legislation
under § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment.
541 U.S. 600, 609-10 (2004). As the
facially invalidated a suspicionless drug testing policy when the city could not justify its
application as to all employees,
id. at 1342. In the first place, Baron has no precedential value.
Second, Baron makes the same mistake we have identified in the Union’s argument. It implicitly
defines the application of a drug testing policy as the testing of all employees, rather than the
testing of one employee. As the Ninth Circuit has explained in rejecting an argument that relied
upon Baron, this mistake “would turn Salerno on its head.” See Lanier v. City of Woodburn,
518
F.3d 1147, 1150 (9th Cir. 2008).
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Court put it, “[o]utside these limited settings, and absent a good reason, we do not
extend an invitation to bring overbreadth claims.”
Id. at 610. The Supreme Court
has not sanctioned this type of facial invalidation in the Fourth Amendment
context, and we can discern no basis to do so here.
C.
As a fallback position, the Union suggests that we could refashion the
judgment and injunction simply by cutting them down to cover only those
categories of employees as to whom the Executive Order’s application is
unconstitutional. While an appellate court undoubtedly has the power to modify
injunctions, see United States v. Nat’l Treasury Emps. Union,
513 U.S. 454, 480
(1995), or to affirm a judgment as to some plaintiffs but not others, see Allen v.
Bd. of Pub. Educ.,
495 F.3d 1306, 1320 (11th Cir. 2007), we decline to do so
because the sort of fact-intensive line-drawing required is a task that properly
belongs to the district court. Unlike the typical case where we may affirm a
judgment as to some plaintiffs but not as to others, we are dealing here not with a
manageable number of individual plaintiffs but with a current workforce of some
85,000 state employees. Nor is the district court’s order as amenable to
modification as the injunction in Nat’l Treasury Emps. Union, which the Supreme
Court altered solely to exclude non-plaintiffs. In sharp contrast, in order to modify
the judgment and injunction before us, we would be required to “differentiate[]
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between job categories designated for testing,” scrutinize the State’s rationale for
testing each job category, and “conduct[] the balancing test” laid out in Skinner
and its progeny. See Nat’l Fed’n of Fed. Emps. v. Vilsack,
681 F.3d 483, 489
(D.C. Cir. 2012). As it currently stands, the district court’s order does not break
down the covered employees on a job-category-by-category basis, which leaves us
with little basis for determining which portions of the declaratory judgment and the
injunction are proper. Thus, while we could simply enjoin the EO as to all
employees except those in certain safety-sensitive job categories -- those who carry
firearms in the course of law-enforcement duties, for instance, or those who
operate heavy machinery -- and end up probably being right, we would be
pronouncing the law without really knowing the facts. Cf. United States v. Banks,
347 F.3d 1266, 1271-72 (11th Cir. 2003).
Although the Union did divide the covered employees at least into an
“arguably” safety-sensitive group (encompassing roughly 40 percent of all covered
employees) and a non-safety-sensitive group, we understand that the Union’s
position is that some of the employees in the arguably safety-sensitive group
actually are not subject to suspicionless testing, while the State’s position is that
some employees in the non-safety-sensitive group are subject to suspicionless
testing. Thus, for instance, the State included all employees at the Department of
Corrections within its answer to the Union’s interrogatories. The Union will
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undoubtedly contest whether some categories of DOC employees should be
included within the safety-sensitive category. Meanwhile, the State may be able to
identify job categories that the Union has labeled non-safety-sensitive but that
actually present real, substantial, and immediate threats to public safety. The
Union’s interrogatories, for instance, never asked about the number of doctors or
medical personnel employed by the State. Yet some courts of appeals have held
that government-employed medical residents or emergency medical technicians are
safety-sensitive employees. See Pierce v. Smith,
117 F.3d 866, 874 (5th Cir. 1997);
Piroglu v. Coleman,
25 F.3d 1098, 1102 (D.C. Cir. 1994). In light of the wholly
undefined nature of the non-safety-sensitive group, and the fact that the current
division was found only in the submission of one party in an answer to some
interrogatories rather than in the district court’s own finding, we are convinced that
determining the proper composition of those groups is a task best left to the district
court in the first instance. In order for the district court to accomplish this task, the
parties must provide the court with more extensive, job-category-specific facts than
the record currently contains. It is difficult to imagine how this category-specific
balancing task can be accomplished without additional discovery.
Thus, we vacate and remand both the declaratory judgment and the
corresponding injunction in order for the district court to conduct further
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factfinding and to recraft its relief to cover only those groups as to which the
Executive Order’s application is unconstitutional.
III.
The State does not ask us merely to vacate and remand; boldly, it urges us to
reverse the denial of its summary judgment motion and to direct the district court
to grant judgment in its favor. The State argues that there is no need for the district
court to conduct the very job-category-by-category balancing that the Supreme
Court’s case law commands. Instead, the State offers several reasons that, it
claims, can justify suspicionless drug testing of all 85,000 government employees
regardless of the nature of their specific job functions. Based on these generic
reasons, the State asks us to approve a testing policy of unprecedented scope. We
are unpersuaded.
The State’s arguments, which are stated so abstractly, cannot satisfy the
special-needs balancing test laid out in Skinner and its progeny. Those cases
conducted the special-needs balancing test not at a high order of generality but in a
fact-intensive manner that paid due consideration to the characteristics of a
particular job category (e.g., the degree of risk that mistakes on the job pose to
public safety), the important privacy interests at stake, and other context-specific
concerns (e.g., evidence of a preexisting drug problem). The State’s arguments
have not convinced us that Skinner and its progeny are inapplicable, nor can they
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obviate the need for job-category-by-category scrutiny. Just as we know that some
subset of state employees almost certainly can be tested due to specific, important
safety concerns, we know that there are some employees who almost certainly
cannot be tested without individualized suspicion. Again, the problem is that the
factual record is almost barren, and the balancing calculus required by Supreme
Court case law cannot be exercised in a vacuum.
A.
The State’s first justification is that employees have consented to testing by
submitting to the testing requirement rather than quitting their jobs, and that this
consent renders the Executive Order’s search reasonable and hence constitutional.
In effect, the State is offering its employees this Hobson’s choice: either they
relinquish their Fourth Amendment rights and produce a urine sample which
carries the potential for termination, or they accept termination immediately.
Moreover, rather than treating this exacted consent as part of the special-needs
balancing test, the State instead argues that this consent, standing alone, justifies
suspicionless drug testing.
To begin with, we do not agree that employees’ submission to drug testing,
on pain of termination, constitutes consent under governing Supreme Court case
law. See
Lebron, 710 F.3d at 1214-15. Although a “search conducted pursuant to a
valid consent is constitutionally permissible,” Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412
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61
U.S. 218, 222 (1973), consent must be “in fact voluntarily given, and not the result
of duress or coercion, express or implied.”
Id. at 248; see also Bumper v. North
Carolina,
391 U.S. 543, 548 (1968); Johnson v. United States,
333 U.S. 10, 13
(1948) (consent invalid when “granted in submission to authority rather than as an
understanding and intentional waiver of a constitutional right”). Employees who
must submit to a drug test or be fired are hardly acting voluntarily, free of either
express or implied duress and coercion. See Bostic v. McClendon,
650 F. Supp.
245, 249 (N.D. Ga. 1986); cf. Garrity v. New Jersey,
385 U.S. 493, 497-98 (1967)
(holding that the government cannot require its employees to relinquish their Fifth
Amendment rights on pain of termination because “[t]he option to lose their means
of livelihood or to pay the penalty of self-incrimination” was “the antithesis of free
choice”).
Moreover, consent has already been adequately incorporated into the
special-needs balancing test, which obliges us to evaluate whether an employee’s
choice of profession necessarily diminishes her expectation of privacy. In Skinner,
the Court weighed the railroad employees’ “participation in an industry that is
regulated pervasively to ensure
safety,” 489 U.S. at 627, as a factor militating in
favor of drug testing. In Von Raab, the Court explained that employees’ choice of
“certain forms of public employment may diminish privacy expectations even with
respect to . . . personal
searches.” 489 U.S. at 671. For instance, “[e]mployees of
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the United States Mint . . . should expect to be subject to certain routine personal
searches when they leave the workplace every day.”
Id. Finally, the Court echoed
this view of consent in Vernonia, in which the student athletes and their parents
had signed explicit consent forms granting the school the right to test the athletes.
See 515 U.S. at 650. Nonetheless, the Court did not treat this factor as dispositive.
Instead, as the Court saw it, the athletes’ choice to participate was a choice to
“voluntarily subject themselves to a degree of regulation even higher than that
imposed on students generally,” and amounted to “an additional respect in which
school athletes have a reduced expectation of privacy.”
Id. at 657 (emphasis
added). Thus, there seems to be no way to square Skinner and its progeny with the
argument that consent justifies the Executive Order’s drug testing requirement.
This Court’s recent decision in Lebron rejected a similar argument that
welfare recipients had consented to suspicionless drug testing when the State
required testing as a precondition to the receipt of their benefits. As the panel in
Lebron put it, a welfare recipient’s “mandatory ‘consent’” was of no
“constitutional significance” because it was a “‘submission to authority rather than
. . . an understanding and intentional waiver of a constitutional
right.’” 710 F.3d at
1214-15 (quoting
Johnson, 333 U.S. at 13). The panel in Lebron also canvassed the
suspicionless drug testing cases and concluded that, to the extent consent was
relevant, it had already been incorporated into the balancing calculus. While the
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context in Lebron was different because the State sought to test a population of
private citizens, which implicates somewhat different privacy concerns, the panel’s
logic and reasoning are fairly applicable to these circumstances. As the panel in
Lebron explained, every time the Supreme Court has addressed a suspicionless
drug testing policy -- whether those tested were private citizens or government
employees -- it has analyzed the issue through the prism of Skinner’s special-needs
balancing test. See
id. at 1215. Surrendering to drug testing in order to remain
eligible for a government benefit such as employment or welfare, whatever else it
is, is not the type of consent that automatically renders a search reasonable as a
matter of law.4
4
The State cites several cases that, it claims, compel us to conclude that this exaction of consent
renders suspicionless drug testing reasonable notwithstanding Skinner and its progeny or our
recent pronouncement in Lebron. Those cases are all readily distinguishable.
In Wyman v. James, the Supreme Court addressed whether a welfare beneficiary could
refuse a caseworker home visit that was a requirement of receiving her benefits.
400 U.S. 309,
310 (1971). James argued that the visitation requirement violated her Fourth Amendment rights,
but the Supreme Court ultimately held that there was no Fourth Amendment violation because
the caseworker visit was not a search. See
id. at 317. Since the Wyman Court held the visit not to
be a search, while the Supreme Court has repeatedly and squarely held that a drug test is a
search, see, e.g.,
Vernonia, 515 U.S. at 652, Wyman is inapposite.
United States v. Sihler concerned a warrantless search by prison officials of a guard who
had smuggled drugs into the prison.
562 F.2d 349, 350 (5th Cir. 1977). The prison had a
prominent sign that stated, “All persons entering upon these confines are subject to routine
searches of their person, property or packages.”
Id. The Fifth Circuit held that “Sihler voluntarily
accepted and continued an employment which subjected him to search on a routine basis,” and,
therefore, “the search . . . was made with his consent.”
Id. at 351. Notably, Sihler preceded
Skinner and its progeny. Nevertheless, Sihler is consistent with those cases because it dealt with
a specific, safety-sensitive context -- a federal penitentiary. Much like “[e]mployees of the
United States Mint . . . should expect to be subject to certain routine personal searches when they
leave the workplace,” Von
Raab, 489 U.S. at 671, a prison guard may fairly expect to be
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Indeed, at least one court of appeals has rejected a similar argument to the
one that the State has made here. In McDonell v. Hunter, a case decided even
before Skinner and its progeny lent further support to our position, the Eighth
Circuit squarely rejected the idea that “employees who signed consent forms have
no legitimate expectation of privacy.” See
809 F.2d 1302, 1310 (8th Cir. 1987). “If
a search is unreasonable, a government employer cannot require that its employees
consent to that search as a condition of employment.”
Id. (citing Pickering v. Bd.
of Educ.,
391 U.S. 563, 568 (1968)); see also United Teachers of New Orleans v.
Orleans Parish Sch. Bd.,
142 F.3d 853, 856-57 (5th Cir. 1998). The courts of
appeals have also applied the special-needs balancing test, rather than treating
consent as the sole determinant of a policy’s constitutionality, in cases where the
searched for contraband at work. Sihler cannot and does not stand for the far-reaching
proposition that all 85,000 state employees have consented to drug testing simply by coming to
work.
Finally, the State cites a Third Circuit case, Kerns v. Chalfont-New Britain Twp. Joint
Sewage Auth., where the plaintiff applied for a job that required a pre-employment drug test.
263
F.3d 61, 64 (3d Cir. 2001). The plant hired him on a probationary basis after he failed one drug
test but passed a second. See
id. Later, when asked to submit to a third test, Kerns did so, failed
again, and was fired.
Id. at 64-65. Kerns sued, alleging that the plant violated his Fourth
Amendment rights. The district court granted the township summary judgment after finding that
Kerns had consented to the test. See
id. at 65. The Third Circuit reviewed that factual finding for
clear error and affirmed because the record provided some evidence to support the finding that
Kerns had consented to the test.
Id. at 65-66.
Kerns cannot support the State’s sweeping argument that all current employees consent to
drug testing simply by choosing to remain employed. Kerns turned on a factual finding of
consent in an individual case, which the Third Circuit reviewed for clear error. In this case, the
State asks us to rule that, as a matter of law, all of its employees consent to drug testing by
simply choosing to remain employed in their current position. Nothing we have read sustains this
argument.
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government attempted to compel consent to drug testing as a condition for
obtaining some privilege. See, e.g., Joy v. Penn-Harris-Madison Sch. Corp.,
212
F.3d 1052, 1055 (7th Cir. 2000);
id. at 1067 (upholding a policy insofar as it
provided for alcohol testing of student drivers but striking it down insofar as it
provided for nicotine testing, despite the fact that student drivers signed consent
forms authorizing both).
In short, the State’s consent argument cannot, standing alone, render the EO
constitutional.
B.
Next, the State argues, again at a high order of abstraction, that the
Executive Order is constitutional under Skinner’s special-needs balancing test
because the need for a safe and efficient workplace necessarily outweighs state
employees’ expectations of privacy. This argument, however, does not entitle the
State to summary judgment. The State’s abstract reasons do not fit within the
narrow scope that the Supreme Court has given to the special-needs exception and,
therefore, cannot justify testing every category of employee covered by the EO.
Indeed, if those reasons could suffice, then there would never be any need to
balance anything or consider any job-category-specific rationales.
We repeat that individualized suspicion is the normal requirement in this
context, and the special-needs cases are only “particularized exceptions to the main
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rule.” See
Chandler, 520 U.S. at 313. To the extent the State’s justifications hinge
on drug-related productivity loss and other expenses, such as medical care, they are
insufficient. Although at oral argument, counsel suggested that the State’s need to
maintain an orderly and efficient workplace is enough of a special need to justify
suspicionless testing, the authority cited -- O’Connor v. Ortega,
480 U.S. 709
(1987) -- cannot sustain this proposition. O’Connor held only that, in the
workplace context, the “need for supervision, control, and the efficient operation of
the workplace” meant that a workplace search was not subject to the warrant or
probable-cause requirements. See
id. at 720-26. O’Connor neither held nor
remotely suggested that the need for an efficient workplace could justify searches
without individualized suspicion.
The only employment-related rationales that the Supreme Court has
endorsed as being sufficient to justify suspicionless drug testing are a “substantial
and real” risk to public safety or direct involvement in drug interdiction functions.
Chandler, 520 U.S. at 323; see also Von
Raab, 489 U.S. at 670. Indeed, if safety is
the justification, then public safety must be “genuinely in jeopardy,”
Chandler, 520
U.S. at 323; see also Lanier v. City of Woodburn,
518 F.3d 1147, 1151-52 (9th Cir.
2008). Notably, in Chandler, the Court summed up the principle undergirding this
line of precedent:
[W]here the risk to public safety is substantial and real, blanket
suspicionless searches calibrated to the risk may rank as ‘reasonable’ -
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- for example, searches now routine at airports and at entrances to
courts and other official buildings. But where . . . public safety is not
genuinely in jeopardy, the Fourth Amendment precludes the
suspicionless search, no matter how conveniently
arranged.
520 U.S. at 323 (citation omitted).
The State’s safety argument, at least in its current, global form, is
insufficient. The State does not advance specific concerns relating to particular job
categories and instead asserts only a broad concern for safety that applies to all
employees. But we have little doubt that a clerk, for example, cannot be subject to
suspicionless drug testing under the theory that she presents some vague and
indefinite safety risk. In comparison, the safety risks that justified suspicionless
drug testing regimes in Skinner and its progeny were far more pressing. In Skinner,
railroad accidents had led to 25 deaths, 61 non-fatal injuries, and extensive
property loss.
See 489 U.S. at 607. In Von Raab, the concern was with law
enforcement officers who carried firearms.
See 489 U.S. at 671. Here, the State
offers the hypothetical examples of an office employee “present[ing] a danger
when driving a car in the workplace parking lot” or falling prey to “the myriad
hazards that exist in the workplace environment (from stacks of heavy boxes, to
high stair cases, to files on high shelves, to wet floors, to elevators and
escalators).” We reject the idea that a stack of heavy boxes or a wet floor falls
within the same ballpark of risk as the operation of a ten-thousand-ton freight train
or the danger posed by a person carrying a firearm.
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As the Supreme Court did in Chandler, the courts of appeals consistently
have rejected testing policies that the government justified based only on
generalized and indefinite safety concerns. Those cases underscore that, “where the
government asserts ‘special needs’ for intruding on Fourth Amendment rights, . . .
the specific context matters.”
Vilsack, 681 F.3d at 492. “[T]he governmental
concern in the general ‘integrity of its workforce’ [i]s insufficiently important to
warrant random drug testing . . . .”
Id. at 491-92. Thus, in Vilsack, the D.C. Circuit
rejected a random drug testing policy that covered all Forest Service Job Corps
Center employees.
Id. at 499. Similarly, in Lanier, the Ninth Circuit prohibited the
application of a city’s drug-testing policy to a library page.
See 518 F.3d at 1152.
As the panel in Lanier explained, “the need for suspicionless testing must be far
more specific and substantial than the generalized existence of a societal [drug]
problem.”
Id. at 1150.
Indeed, if the State’s rationale sufficed to justify suspicionless drug testing,
then the exception would swallow the rule and render meaningless Von Raab’s
distinction between those employees for whom physical fitness, mental sharpness,
and dexterity are paramount and “government employees in
general.” 489 U.S. at
672. Since the State’s generic justifications could apply to all government
employees in any context, there would be nothing left of the individualized-
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suspicion requirement in any type of government employment, and no interests to
balance.
Nor does the State shore up its case for across-the-board, suspicionless drug
testing with evidence of a preexisting drug problem. Although the State does not
need to present evidence of a drug problem in the group it seeks to test, see Von
Raab, 489 U.S. at 674-75, a showing of an existing problem “would shore up an
assertion of special need,”
Chandler, 520 U.S. at 319. The problem with the State’s
evidence is that some of it is too broad to be of any use, and the rest is too specific
to justify the breadth of the testing regime the EO mandates. The bulk of the
evidence canvasses the prevalence and harms of drug use in the general population.
But Supreme Court case law contemplates a more targeted showing of drug abuse
in the group to be tested, not people as a whole. In Skinner, for instance, the
Federal Railroad Administration identified a score of drug or alcohol-related train
accidents, and industry participants admitted that there was a serious drug problem
among railroad
workers. 489 U.S. at 607-08. The State’s evidence is so general
that, if accepted as evidence of a drug problem among state employees, it would
have to be accepted in every other government employment context.
On the other hand, the relevant data the State presents is too narrow to
justify the EO. First of all, the evidence actually suggests that drug use is a
relatively small problem in the three departments already subject to random testing
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prior to the EO’s issuance. The worst result the State obtained was when 2.5
percent of DOC employees tested positive in 2011. This hardly demonstrates the
existence of a serious drug problem. In fact, as the State itself submitted, a 2010
national survey indicated that 8.4 percent of full-time employees nationwide were
illicit-drug users. If anything, then, the results of the State’s random testing reveals
that there is substantially less of a drug problem among state employees than
among the general working population as a whole. Cf.
Lebron, 710 F.3d at 1211
n.6 (evidence showed that Florida Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
recipients tested positive at a 5.1 percent rate, which “was lower than had been
reported in other national studies of welfare recipients”).
There is still another problem with the State’s submissions. The data, even
assuming it did indicate a drug problem among employees at DOC, DOT, and DJJ,
does not demonstrate the prevalence of drug abuse in other state agencies. Thus,
even if those results could bolster a case for testing employees at those three
agencies -- testing which in any event is independently authorized by state statutes
not at issue in this case -- it would not provide strong support for extending testing
to all state employees. In short, the State has fallen far short of showing a
preexisting drug problem that pervades its entire workforce.
On the other side of the balancing test, the State also claims that state
employees’ expectations of privacy are diminished for two reasons other than
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consent. First, drug testing among private employers has become common, and this
“customary social usage [has] a substantial bearing on Fourth Amendment
reasonableness.” Georgia v. Randolph,
547 U.S. 103, 121 (2006). Second, Florida
has a tradition of open government that diminishes state employees’ expectations
of privacy. We find neither argument persuasive.
The problem with the first one is that it confuses what the Supreme Court
means by a diminished expectation of privacy -- or, more precisely, what baseline
courts should use to determine whether an employee’s expectation of privacy is
diminished. The proper baseline is the ordinary government employee’s
expectation of privacy. In Von Raab, for example, the Supreme Court concluded
that Customs Service employees involved in drug interdiction had a diminished
expectation of privacy precisely because, “[u]nlike most private citizens or
government employees in general, employees involved in drug interdiction
reasonably should expect effective inquiry into their fitness and
probity.” 489 U.S.
at 672 (emphasis added). In other words, the appropriate inquiry is whether the
employee being tested has a diminished expectation of privacy relative to the
ordinary government employee because her position depends on physical fitness
and judgment. The State’s broad-based argument that all of its employees have a
reduced expectation of privacy contradicts binding case law.
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The second argument is similarly unpersuasive. Open government laws
require state employees to disclose certain financial information and also their
official work product. The logical leap from disclosure of financial information
and work product to a diminished expectation of privacy in an employee’s physical
body is a substantial one. All of the Supreme Court’s cases discuss the diminished
expectation of privacy specifically with regard to physical or bodily privacy, not
privacy more broadly conceived. Thus, in Skinner, employees’ expectations of
privacy were “diminished” because of regulations pertaining to their “health and
fitness.”
See 489 U.S. at 627; see also Von
Raab, 489 U.S. at 672 (Customs
Service employees should have expected inquiries into their “fitness” and
“dexterity”). Vernonia is perhaps the clearest example of this focus on physical
privacy. When explaining why athletes have a lower expectation of privacy, the
Court pointed out that “[s]chool sports are not for the bashful” and require
“‘suiting up’ before each practice or event, and showering and changing
afterwards” in “locker rooms . . . not notable for the privacy they
afford.” 515 U.S.
at 657. It is readily apparent, then, that when courts analyze employees’
expectations of privacy in this context, it is their physical privacy that is relevant.
None of the State’s arguments demonstrate that all state employees,
including those who have no reasonable relation to safety-sensitive tasks, have a
reduced expectation of privacy. Just as the State must demonstrate job-category-
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specific interests, so too must it demonstrate why each particular job category it
seeks to cover under the Executive Order has a diminished expectation of privacy
compared to the ordinary government employee. 5
In sum, we cannot find that the State’s proffered rationales warrant summary
judgment in the State’s favor concerning all job categories and all employees
covered by the EO. In this case, the character of the intrusion is relatively
noninvasive and, “if the ‘special needs’ showing had been made, the State could
not be faulted for excessive intrusion.”
Chandler, 520 U.S. at 318. However, the
State has failed to make that showing. As the district court concluded, the State’s
case most closely resembles Georgia’s failed justification of the policy held
unconstitutional in Chandler. Unlike in Skinner or Von Raab, where the specific
job categories subject to testing had a diminished expectation of privacy, the State
has failed to demonstrate that all 85,000 state employees somehow have
diminished privacy rights. Moreover, it has failed to provide a compelling or
5
The special-needs balancing test also considers the nature of the intrusion -- in other words,
how invasive the drug-testing protocol is -- and the efficacy of the testing. Neither factor plays a
determinative role in this case. The character of the intrusion here is very similar to that in
Skinner, Von Raab, Vernonia, and Earls. The State’s urinalysis protocol, which does not require
direct observation and which shields results from being used as evidence or disclosed in any
public or private proceeding, is no more invasive than those procedures that the Supreme Court
characterized as “minimally intrusive” in Earls or as “negligible” in Vernonia. In those cases, a
monitor accompanied the students to the bathroom, where they produced a sample without the
monitor’s direct visual inspection. See
Earls, 536 U.S. at 832-34;
Vernonia, 515 U.S. at 658; see
also
Skinner, 489 U.S. at 626. The confidentiality of test results also weighs in favor of finding
the intrusion more minimal. See Von
Raab, 489 U.S. at 672 n.2. Thus, the nature of the intrusion
poses no more of a barrier to a finding of reasonableness in this case than it did in those Supreme
Court cases. Nor do the parties contest the policy’s efficacy.
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important reason for testing; indeed, it has offered only general and weak
justifications regarding workplace efficiency and the possible -- not “substantial
and real,” see
Chandler, 520 U.S. at 323 -- risks to safety that any state employee
may pose.
IV.
One final issue has been raised by the parties: who bears the burden in a
suspicionless drug testing case. In light of limited authority on this issue, and in
order to provide the district court with guidance on remand, we clarify the precise
burdens each party bears.
There are several different burdens that arise in this case. For starters, on a
motion for summary judgment, “[t]he moving party bears the burden of showing
that there are no . . . genuine factual issues and that [it] is entitled to summary
judgment as a matter of law.” Gossett v. Du-Ra-Kel Corp.,
569 F.2d 869, 872 (5th
Cir. 1978).6 Moreover, “in a [42 U.S.C.] § 1983 action, the plaintiff bears the
burden of persuasion on every element.” Cuesta v. Sch. Bd. of Miami-Dade Cnty.,
Fla.,
285 F.3d 962, 970 (11th Cir. 2002). Thus, in Cuesta, when a § 1983 plaintiff
alleged that she was subjected to a strip search without reasonable suspicion, it was
“her burden to show that the County lacked reasonable suspicion to search her.”
Id.
6
In Bonner v. City of Prichard,
661 F.2d 1206, 1209 (11th Cir. 1981) (en banc), this Court
adopted as binding precedent all decisions of the former Fifth Circuit handed down prior to
October 1, 1981.
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There is no question, therefore, that the Union ultimately bears the burden of
persuasion in this case.
In the drug testing context, a plaintiff may initially meet both the burden of
going forward and the initial burden of persuasion by demonstrating that (1) there
was a search; and (2) it was conducted without individualized suspicion, which
ordinarily is the minimum requirement of the Fourth Amendment. See
Chandler,
520 U.S. at 313. That showing creates a presumption that the search was
unconstitutional and shifts the burden of production to the testing policy’s
proponent to make the special-needs showing explicated in Skinner and its
progeny. If the proponent of testing fails to respond, or fails to produce a sufficient
special-needs showing, then the plaintiff would prevail. If the proponent does
respond by demonstrating that it had special needs sufficiently important to justify
a suspicionless search, then the district court must conduct the special-needs
balancing test, bearing in mind that the ultimate burden of persuasion remains
squarely on the plaintiff. In this case, the Union met its initial burden because on
its face the EO mandates random, suspicionless testing across the board. At this
point, the burden of going forward -- that is, the burden of production -- then
shifted to the State to articulate its justification for conducting those tests without
individualized suspicion.
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We apply this burden-shifting framework for several reasons. To begin with,
a panel of this Court in Lebron held that the burden of producing the special-needs
showing rests with the State.
See 710 F.3d at 1211 n.6 (“[T]he Supreme Court has
unequivocally stated that it is the state which must show a substantial special need
to justify its drug testing.”). As the concurring opinion in Lebron noted, “[i]t is
undisputed that a drug test is a search under the Fourth Amendment, and that the
government generally has the burden of justifying a warrantless search.”
Id. at
1219 (Jordan, J., concurring) (citing United States v. Bachner,
706 F.2d 1121, 1126
(11th Cir. 1983)); accord
id. (explaining that “the government has the burden of
establishing a ‘special need’ for a warrantless and suspicionless drug testing
requirement.”). And although there is scant authority outside this Circuit
discussing the distribution of burdens in suspicionless drug testing cases, the D.C.
Circuit has observed that, “[a]lthough neither Von Raab nor Skinner directly
addressed this question, Von Raab may hint that the burden rests with the
government.” Am. Fed’n of Gov’t Emps. v. Skinner,
885 F.2d 884, 894 (D.C. Cir.
1989).
Indeed, the relevant Supreme Court cases suggest that the government bears
the burden of producing the special-needs showing once the plaintiff has made an
initial showing of an unconstitutional search. In Von Raab, for example, the
Supreme Court concluded that “the Government has demonstrated that its
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compelling interests in safeguarding our borders and the public safety outweigh the
privacy expectations of
employees.” 489 U.S. at 677 (emphasis added). Similarly,
in Chandler, the Court stated, “[W]e note, first, that the testing method the Georgia
statute describes is relatively noninvasive; therefore, if the ‘special needs’ showing
had been made, the State could not be faulted for excessive
intrusion.” 520 U.S. at
318; accord
id. (“Georgia has failed to show, in justification of [its drug testing
statute], a special need of that kind.”). These passages imply that the burden rests
with the proponent of the testing policy to come forward with evidence of a special
need. This is true even though both cases were civil lawsuits in which the plaintiffs
challenged the testing and thus bore the ultimate burden of persuasion. What
happened in those cases is that the plaintiffs met their initial burden, and the
burden of production then shifted to the government to demonstrate a special need
sufficiently important to outweigh the plaintiffs’ privacy interests.
Moreover, this burden-shifting framework follows directly from Fed. R.
Evid. 301, which states that, “[i]n a civil case . . . the party against whom a
presumption is directed has the burden of producing evidence to rebut the
presumption.” Once a § 1983 plaintiff proves that the Fourth Amendment’s
ordinary requirements have not been met, we presume that a search is
unconstitutional. Cf. Groh v. Ramirez,
540 U.S. 551, 564 (2004) (since a home
search ordinarily requires a warrant, “a warrantless search of the home is
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presumptively unconstitutional”). Then, the government, which is the party against
whom the presumption is directed, must make a sufficiently powerful showing to
justify its intrusion on the plaintiff’s expectation of privacy. Consistent with the
general rule in § 1983 cases, Fed. R. Evid. 301 “does not shift the burden of
persuasion, which remains on the party who had it originally.”
Shifting the burden of production to the government to justify a warrantless
search is a familiar feature of § 1983 civil lawsuits raising Fourth Amendment
claims. Thus, for example, when a plaintiff asserts that the police conducted an
unconstitutional warrantless search, and the government claims that its search was
legal under an exception to the warrant requirement, other courts of appeals have
held that the plaintiff meets its initial burden by demonstrating the absence of a
search warrant. At that point, it is the government that bears the burden of coming
forward with evidence that an exception to the warrant requirement applied. See
Der v. Connolly,
666 F.3d 1120, 1127-28 & n.2 (8th Cir. 2012) (when § 1983
plaintiff shows a search is presumptively violative of the Fourth Amendment, the
government has the “burden of going forward with evidence to meet or rebut the
presumption,” e.g., “evidence of consent or of some other recognized exception”);
Valance v. Wisel,
110 F.3d 1269, 1279 (7th Cir. 1997); Ruggiero v. Krzeminski,
928 F.2d 558, 563 (2d Cir. 1991).
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Finally, this allocation of burdens makes sense. The proponent of testing is
the party best positioned to come forward with its reasons for conducting
suspicionless drug testing. We will not require plaintiffs to do the impossible: to
speculate as to all possible reasons justifying the policy they are challenging and
then to prove a negative -- that is, prove that the government had no special needs
when it enacted its drug testing policy. Here the plaintiff Union demonstrated that
the State intended to conduct a suspicionless broad-based search, which shifted the
burden of production to the State to justify itself based on a special-needs
exception to the individualized-suspicion requirement. On remand, therefore, the
State must come forward with the requisite special-needs showing for all
categories of employees it seeks to test. For some categories, this showing may
turn out to be quite simple and may amount simply to describing precisely the
nature of the job and the attendant risks. Thus, for example, as to state law
enforcement employees who carry firearms in the course of duty, the State likely
will need to do little more than identify those employees. Von Raab’s holding
makes it clear that those employees present the type of serious safety risk that
justifies suspicionless drug testing. For other categories of employees, however,
the State must make a stronger and more specific showing than it has produced
thus far. Thus, as to run-of-the-mill office employees, for example, the State must
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demonstrate how those employees present a serious safety risk comparable to those
recognized in Skinner and its progeny.
V.
To date, the parties’ litigation strategies in this case seem to have focused on
avoiding the kind of job-category-by-category balancing that Skinner and its
progeny teach us is the proper modality for evaluating the constitutionality of a
suspicionless drug testing policy. The Union originally sought, and ultimately
received, facial relief that cannot be sustained in light of the Executive Order’s
constitutional applications. Meanwhile, the State has resisted providing the district
court with any specific special-needs showings that apply to individual job
categories and instead has insisted that a few broad, abstract reasons can justify the
EO across the board. Admittedly, providing job-category-specific reasons and
evidence -- which the district court must have in order to conduct the proper
analysis -- is a substantial, even onerous, task. Nonetheless, convenience cannot
override the commands of the Constitution.
Nor can the parties’ desire for expediency allow a court to conduct the
necessary calculus in the abstract and in the absence of any real factual record.
Since the State has failed to meet its burden of production under the special-needs
balancing test, we can discern no basis to reverse the district court’s order and
direct that judgment be entered in the State’s favor. The State has fallen far short of
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justifying the breathtaking scope of the Executive Order, and we have found no
precedent approving so indiscriminate a testing regime. On the other hand, the
Union has presented a serious and substantial claim that large swathes of the EO’s
applications are unconstitutional. But we cannot affirm a judgment and injunction
that forbid both constitutional and unconstitutional conduct.
Accordingly, we vacate both the declaratory judgment and the injunction
and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
VACATED AND REMANDED.
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