Jacob Smith ‘23
Professor Liaison
It is hard to get further from the ivory tower than Professor Thomas Frampton, a former public defender who teaches criminal law and civil rights litigation at UVA. But currently, he is also both a defendant and a civil rights plaintiff. He is not exactly pleased about this situation, which he described as “annoying.” He admitted, however, that it will be a great story to tell once it is firmly in the rearview mirror.
So how did this happen? Before teaching, Professor Frampton worked as a public defender in New Orleans, and he still maintains an active pro bono practice. This January, Professor Frampton helped a client bring a 42 U.S.C. §1983 civil rights lawsuit against the Baton Rouge Police Department after a series of indignities that included a public strip-search of the client and his sixteen-year-old brother.
The civil rights lawsuit settled in May for $35,000. Nevertheless, Professor Frampton said the police “weren’t doing anything” to hold the officers involved accountable. So Professor Frampton’s clients decided to release body camera footage of the search. They posted it to YouTube and put out press releases. It quickly went viral, and CBS Evening News, among other news outlets, picked up the story.
On May 28, the day after the CBS story, and just as he was watching a press conference responding to the media firestorm, Professor Frampton received an email. The Parish Attorney was bringing contempt proceedings against him. In Louisiana, contempt of court is a quasi-criminal offense punishable with a fine of up to five hundred dollars, six months in jail, or both. He alleged that Professor Frampton had released records of a juvenile criminal proceeding without authorization, since his client’s brother was a juvenile when he was searched.
Professor Frampton was “deeply freaked out.” Fortunately, he has an extensive network of contacts in the public interest world and immediately began reaching out. A lot of people were willing to help. He assembled a “stellar legal team”—the ACLU, Tulane Law School’s First Amendment clinic, and two local civil rights attorneys who knew him from his previous work. “I actually feel a little bashful that so much legal brainpower is being deployed on my behalf, when there’s so much other important work,” Professor Frampton said.
Along with providing representation in the state contempt proceeding, this dream team filed a §1983 lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana on June 23. They sued the City of Baton Rouge, its mayor, and its police chief. The complaint[1] alleges that Professor Frampton engaged in protected First Amendment activity in releasing the video, and the defendants retaliated against him because of that speech. As illustrated in the complaint, there are troubling questions about why Professor Frampton was charged. To start with, there never was a juvenile court proceeding in the first place against the minor in question. In addition, the camera footage had already been released without formal court authorization to Professor Frampton’s client and to the public defender’s office, and parts were even made public as part of the client’s criminal case record. Finally, Professor Frampton released the footage on behalf of “the individuals whose privacy interests are implicated in the videos,” namely the client and his brother.
As law students, you surely want to know all the nitty-gritty procedural details, so here’s the current situation: to accommodate the federal lawsuit, the Louisiana state hearing has been moved back several times. The parties in the federal case have been briefing a motion for a preliminary injunction and a motion to dismiss, respectively. In the state proceeding, Professor Frampton also filed a motion to dismiss.. About a month ago, he and other witnesses testified in a Zoom evidentiary hearing on his motion for a preliminary injunction in the federal case. Within the next two weeks, Judge John W. deGravelles is expected to rule on those motions. If a preliminary injunction is granted, the state court proceedings will be stayed to allow the federal case to go forward. Normally, federal courts are reluctant to interfere with ongoing state criminal proceedings, under what Fed Courts students will know as Younger abstention,[2] but this case may fall under an exception to that doctrine for bad faith or harassment.
Professor Frampton is much more comfortable teaching and practicing civil rights law than living it. But the law professor has faced the possibility of contempt charges before in his work as a public defender, and he is “hopeful and optimistic” that he will not have to stand trial in the criminal proceedings. And compared with most criminal defendants, Professor Frampton retains fabulous legal representation and has a supportive employer. If nothing else, the situation highlights the City’s willingness to bring criminal charges of questionable validity. As Professor Frampton said, if the Parish Attorney is willing to go after him, a white out-of-state law professor, imagine how they treat indigent persons of color.
---
js3hp@virginia.edu