Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AUSCS), which represented the plaintiffs in this case, issued a press release today:
Americans United Hails Settlement In Case Challenging Religious Content At Calif. Community College Events
Americans United for Separation of Church and State today announced that an out-of-court settlement has been reached in a lawsuit challenging prayer and other religious presentations at events sponsored by a Southern California community college.
The settlement brings an end to a legal challenge filed in November of 2009 by Americans United on behalf of several students and faculty at the South Orange County Community College District.
“I’m pleased that we have reached a fair settlement in this case,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United. “Public community colleges should respect the religious and philosophical rights of all faculty, staff members and students, and I believe today’s settlement provides a framework to do that.”
Plaintiffs asserted that school officials routinely sponsored official invocations at events for students and faculty at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, including scholarship-award ceremonies, commencements and Chancellor's Opening Sessions (training programs for faculty).
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| Karla Westphal |
Under the terms of the settlement, school officials have agreed to discontinue official prayers before scholarship ceremonies and before the Chancellor's Opening Sessions. A planning committee at each college will decide each year whether to have a non-sectarian prayer or moment of silence during graduation ceremonies. (Previously, this task had been left to the college’s Board of Trustees, which almost always chose to include religious messages.)
Plaintiffs in the Westphal v. Wagner lawsuit had protested the prayers many times over several years. The student government of Saddleback College twice passed resolutions opposing the prayer practice, and the faculty’s Academic Senate of Saddleback College, the Academic Senate of Irvine Valley College, the statewide Academic Senate for California Community Colleges and the South Orange County Community College District Faculty Association had also opposed the prayer practice.
Those complaints have now been heard.
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit were: Karla Westphal, Alannah Rosenberg, Margot Lovett and Claire Cesareo-Silva, all professors at Saddleback College; Roy Bauer, a professor at Irvine Valley College; Ashley Mockett, a former student at Saddleback and a current Saddleback student.
The litigation was conducted by AU Legal Director Ayesha N. Khan, AU Madison Fellow Taryn Wilgus Null, former AU Assistant Legal Director Richard B. Katskee and former AU Madison Fellow Jef Klazen. Christopher P. Murphy of Mayer Brown LLP in Los Angeles also assisted.
Below is the actual settlement agreement and attached resolution. The agreement is signed. The resolution will be approved by the SOCCCD board of trustees at the next board meeting.
You can enlarge each graphic (page) by clicking on it.
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Note: I have deleted the portion of the document in which the attorney for defendants and the attorney for plaintiffs sign on behalf of their clients. Rest assured that they have signed and in doing so they represent their clients. Please note that this signed agreement is dated March 31, 2011.
The Resolution:
28 comments:
Congratulations and thank you to all of you students and faculty who pursued the lawsuit and participated in the settlement; I know that it wasn't easy. Your efforts to keep sectarian religion out of state activities are deeply appreciated.
MAH
Thanks, MAH. I do believe that this is a fine resolution of this case. I encourage those interested in it to actually read the settlement terms and the resolution (included on the post).
Great news! Perhaps the committee will select me to give a pagan invocation or some sort of earth friendly one. Wendall Berry comes to mind.
Victory!
Thanks so much for pursuing this important issue.
Victory?..If this, then not that. How does that equate to victory? Nothing changes here as a result of this outcome. Mandatory meetings will be a little more or less business like. All other functions will be in God's name.
I disagree with 7:44's assertion that "nothing changes." I think you should read more closely.
how about this:
Scholarship Ceremonies And Chancellor's Opening Sessions:
Beginning on the effective date of this Agreement, neither the South
Orange County Community College District nor its Colleges (which are
defined as Saddleback College, Irvine Valley College, and the Advanced
Technology & Education Park)shall include an invocation on the program
at any future Scholarship Ceremony or Chancellor's Opening Session.
It seems like a democratic process was developed in order to address this issue.
Thank you for all your efforts.
Not everything changes 7:44 but there are some major concessions here if you read closely.
I appreciate the time and effort the plaintiffs and their legal team put into this.
Good work to those who stuck their necks out for this important cause. And thank you from an employee who couldn't do so.
Does all of the $250,000.00 go to the attornies?
yes - the 250,000 goes to the lawyers. It's my understanding that that is how these things work. I wonder how much the district had to pay for THEIR attorneys - does anyone have the figure on that? I bet it's alot more than what tha plaintiffs' attorneys got.
People can pray whenever and whereever they want - I have never understood the district's insistence that they needed us to all pray together with them, in this a public institution, not a house of worship.
Thanks for your work on this.
Great news!
The district pays only Americans United, not the attorneys, though, no doubt, at least some of the attorneys' work is thereby paid. In this kind of litigation, the plaintiffs are not paid anything. They are suing on behalf of citizens and the Constitution. One can discover how much the district's attorneys have been paid by looking at past agendas, going back to late 2009. Their chief law firm on this case was Jones Day, which is very pricey indeed.
Is 7:44 the erstwhile naysayer that used to tell us, repeatedly, that this suit was doomed to fail?
I checked SOCCCD BOT agendas, starting in May of 2010, and here are the checks to ones Day (the district's attorneys in this particular case):
$349,331 - 4/20/10
$176,193 - 6/15/10
$52,690 - 7/02/10
$79,833 - 8/11/10
$113,003 - 9/13/10
$128,411 - 10/19/10
$11,124 - 12/10/10
$130,565 - 11/22/10
TOTAL: $1,041,150
Of course, they're not yet finished paying their attorneys. --BvT
Make that "Jones Day"
Thank you for doing this important work! I second 8:46 !
$1,041,150.. The only winners here are the lawyers. A change in the program agenda for two events is not worth $1,041,150. Call it victory if you like. The other side is doing the same.
Fewer prayers are FEWER prayers.
Take your complaint about how much they pay their lawyers to the board. The fact that they chose to spend $$$ this way is their own call. Too bad they (the old board majority that pursued this in the first place) couldn't see the problems from the beginning.
But Wagner was just using this issue to promote himself.
If there was a kind of bigger justice than all the attorneys' fees would be paid by Wagner, Mathur, Fuentes and Williams.
Maybe they'll offer to do so anyway.
I bet Fuentes was plenty steamed about this outcome!
I don't get how drafting an answer, taking a few depositions, and having some motions heard generates over a million in fees. Hopefully the financially conservative folks will negotiate this down.
When you hire Jones Day, you don't get reduced rates.
Further, those checks listed above have already been cashed. The money is already paid out. Clearly, there will be another payment, since the lawyers were working until very recently. It is only some such further payment that might involve a reduction, if Jones Day were inclined to provide that. --BvT
Great post! Thank you for keeping us updated and I'm so glad about the outcome of it all. One correction I do have is that student government at SC only passed one resolution in 2009. However with the Board of Trustees changing, they did send the same resolution to the new members this year and fully supported the resolution.
Congratulations!
Folks should go to the next BoT meeting and speak to the $1M+ bill from Jones Day. That's taxpayer money spent to defend what even the most dim-witted conservative should have seen as unconstitutional.
What would happen if a teacher required students to sit through an invocation to Allah or Shiva or Baal or Yahweh or whoever at the beginning of every semester? Would the District have spent a million bucks defending him/her?
--100 miles down the road
OK, so the obvious question is: why hire a firm that bills so magnificently? Who approved these people? Did anyone get some sort of referral fee? This bill just stinks, man. A couple of experienced lawyers with some law student assistants could have done this for much less, and achieved the same results.
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