A federal jury found former Adams County Sheriff Rick Reigenborn was political and punitive and violated the First Amendment when he fired four top commanders after winning the 2018 sheriff’s election because they supported his opponent. The jury awarded the men $5 million on Tuesday.
In the highly unusual case, current Adams County Sheriff Gene Claps and three other former top commanders who were working at the office in 2018 sued their own county commissioners for the wrongful terminations six years ago – even though they have all landed good jobs, or, in one case, even retired by now.
In 2018, all of the men were supporting the incumbent sheriff Mike McIntosh, a Republican, for re-election. They donated to his campaign and showed up at campaign events.
But Reigenborn, a Democrat, and a one-time department sergeant with no top command experience, surprisingly won the 2018 election in a political swing year. On Reigenborn’s first day in office, he summarily fired Claps and a handful of others for no reason other than their past political support, the jury found.
Their lawyers spent nine days in a federal courtroom playing tapes, showing text messages and other documents to jurors proving Reigenborn’s intentions to get revenge on his political enemies when he was sworn in as sheriff. Reigenborn had lost the 2014 election to McIntosh and left the department.
“He nursed a paranoid grudge for four years against Mr. McIntosh's most prominent supporters,” said Iris Halpern, the attorney for the plaintiffs, from the firm Rathod Mohamedbhai. “When he won in 2018, Mr. Reigenborn wasted no time carrying out his personal vendetta, purging the command staff and cleaning house of McIntosh supporters.”
The county’s attorneys countered in closing arguments that Reigenborn had the right to hire his own executive team, but that argument proved unconvincing to the jury.
“The only thing that matters is whether his decision to terminate the employment of these four men violated the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. That's it. That's the only question. And it didn't,” argued Katherine M.L. Pratt, with Thompson Coe, a private firm that represented the county. “This wasn't about plaintiff's political support for Mr. McIntosh. It was about how they treated their coworkers at the Adams County Sheriff's Office.”
The verdict is likely to resonate across Colorado, where the results of sheriff elections can carry political implications for deputies who are often drawn into campaigns whether they like it or not.
A CPR News investigation in 2022 found that Reigenborn abruptly locked top command staff out of the headquarters building after he was sworn in. After firing the top command staff, Reigenborn replaced them with officers from small departments around Colorado.
