A federal appeals court has backed the Lee County school district in a First Amendment lawsuit filed by a farmer who lost a contract to provide fruit and vegetables after calling COVID-19 a “hoax” and posting other controversial comments online.
The 19-page opinion, issued Wednesday by a panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, said then-Superintendent of Schools Gregory Adkins cut off the contract in 2020 because of concerns about food safety during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic — and not because of the views of Alfie Oakes, owner of Oakes Farms Food & Distribution Services LLC.
“Oakes Farms had been selling fruits and vegetables to a local school district for years, and the school board grew worried that Oakes’ views about the pandemic betrayed a lax approach to food safety during a time when not much was known about COVID-19’s transmissibility,” the opinion said. “Worries deepened after requests for the farm’s pandemic protocols turned up nearly nothing, so the superintendent terminated the produce contract. Both Oakes and his farm sued, saying that the contract termination violated Oakes’s First Amendment rights.”
In the opinion, Judge Britt Grant recalled stories early in the pandemic of “shoppers frantically wiping down groceries with disinfectant when they returned home” and wrote that “we cannot say that the school district’s interests here were insignificant.”
“After all, the owner and namesake of Oakes Farms not only believed, but also felt compelled to publicly declare, that the COVID-19 pandemic was a conspiracy by ‘corrupt world powers’ to bring down disfavored political figures, that only ‘lemmings’ who were ‘controlled by deceit and fear’ could be concerned about it, and that safety precautions taken in response were bringing the nation’s economy ‘to ruins,’” the opinion said. “Superintendent Adkins had more than a thin basis for alarm. The combination of all those statements is highly probative of, as Adkins himself put it, ‘not taking this seriously.’ Add to that the less-than-reassuring responses following the school district’s efforts to verify the adequacy of COVID safety protocols at Oakes Farms, and we cannot discount the weight of the district’s interest in ensuring food safety for its students.”
The opinion, joined by Judges Jill Pryor and Stanley Marcus, said Oakes started supplying fruit and vegetables to the school district in 2015, and the school board voted on June 2, 2020, to renew funding for another year.
But on June 6, 2020, Oakes posted on his personal Facebook page a series of comments about what he described as the COVID-19 hoax and other issues such as the Black Lives Matter movement and George Floyd, a Black man who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer.
After trying to get information about COVID-19 protocols, Adkins ended the food contract a few days after the Facebook post, the opinion said.
Oakes and his business sued the school district and school board members on First Amendment retaliation grounds, “alleging that the district terminated the contract because of his speech on matters of public concern,” the opinion said. A U.S. district judge ruled in favor of the district, prompting Oakes to go to the Atlanta-based appeals court.
Grant wrote that there “are fair questions about the strength of the district’s interests because of what we know today about how COVID-19 spreads and its relationship to food safety.”
“But the uncertainty and fear that were almost omnipresent during June 2020 make a demand for perfect scientific precision unfair to the school district,” the opinion said. “And poking holes in its choices with the benefit of hindsight is far from the deferential posture we assume when reviewing the government’s interests.”
