La Prensa San Diego News Desk
The Poway Unified School District spent millions of dollars in legal fees on a seven-year lawsuit defending two Board Trustees who blocked parents on social media, but lost after the case was heard by the US Supreme Court.
This week, a federal district court judge awarded local attorney Cory Briggs over $1,016,000 in legal fees and costs for his work in representing two parents blocked by the Trustees. Briggs had offered the District a fee settlement of $950,000 in July after the final ruling in the case, but the District Board rejected Briggs’ offer before a fee motion was heard in court this week.
Cory Briggs
The lawsuit was filed in October 2017 after Poway Unified School District Board Trustees TJ Zane and Michelle O’Connor-Ratcliff individually blocked parents Christopher and Kimberly Garnier on social media, arguing the profiles were their own private accounts and not part of their official duties as elected officials.
TJ Zane and Michelle O'Conner-Ratcliff
The District decided to defend the two Trustees and incur all of the legal fees for their defenses without requiring them to pay any of the costs themselves.
In January 2021, a San Diego federal judge ruled in favor of the Garniers and ordered the two Trustees to unblock their accounts, finding that the profiles became a public forum after the elected officials posted information about their campaigns and school district issues, not just personal posts.
A federal court judge ruled that the Trustees acted “under color” of state law when they blocked the Garniers.
Poway appealed the ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the district court’s ruling in 2022.
The District then petitioned the US Supreme Court, which heard the case on October 13, 2023, along with a similar case, Lindke v. Freed, where James Freed, City Manager of Port Huron, Michigan, blocked Kevin Lindke and deleted Lindke’s comments from Freed’s personal Facebook page.
The Lindke case, decided by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, used a different test than the Ninth Circuit used in the Poway case, so the Supreme Court took them up together to make a decision that would apply to both cases.
The Supreme Court decided in the Lindke case that Freed had acted “under color of law” when he used his social media account to deliver information about his official position.
The Poway case was remanded back to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to use the new Lindke standard to review the case.
By the time the case returned to the Ninth Circuit in July 2025, Zane had already left the school board after having served two four-year terms through December 2022, so he was dropped from the case before the Appeals Court made its ruling.
O’Connor-Ratcliff still serves on the Board after having been re-elected in 2022.
The Ninth Circuit then upheld the case, deciding that “O’Connor-Ratcliff’s blocking of the Garniers on her social media accounts constituted state action under Lindke.”
The Poway case was similar to a lawsuit filed against President Donald Trump by seven individuals during his first term in office after he blocked them from his social media account.
In that case, a federal district court ruled that Trump violated the individials' First Amendment rights by selectively blocking them, and the case was upheld by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals while Trump was in office.
The case reached the US Supreme Court after Trump had already left office so it was dismissed because the controversy was moot.
Trump’s Twitter account was suspended days after the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol Building for fear he would incite more violence.
In 2022, Trump launched his own social media network, Truth Social, to continue posting online.
Trump was allowed back on Twitter in late 2022, just two months after Elon Musk purchased the online platform. Musk ran an online poll asking users whether Trump should have been allowed to return, and 51.4% voted “Yes.”
Trump's Truth Social account only has 10.9 million followers, compared to the 110 million followers of his X.com account.
DISTRICT'S LEGAL FEES
La Prensa San Diego has filed California Public Records Act requests with Poway School District and the County Office of Education for all payments made to law firms involved in the case to calculate how much the District spent defending the case.
Local attorney Daniel Shinoff represented Poway in this case.
Daniel R. Shinoff
Shinoff has represented most of the 48 school districts in San Diego County over the past 20 years and has been involved in several other high-profile cases that were unsuccessful after years of costly litigation.
In 2013, Shinoff represented Sweetwater Union High School District in a Title IX class-action lawsuit over inadequate funding for softball facilities for girls. The case was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2014.
Shinoff represented the Solana Beach School District in a 2008 case where parents of a special needs student sued over the District’s denial to cover $6,100 in private school costs after the District failed to provide a special education plan for an autistic student as required by federal law. After the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the case, the District unsuccessfully petitioned the US Supreme Court for review.
After the case, the school district was ordered to reimburse the family $580,000 in legal fees in addition to hundreds of thousands paid to the District's lawyers.
In 2014, Shinoff represented the San Ysidro School District when it was sued for wrongfully terminating a contract. The District was hit with a $13.7 million jury verdict, then sued Shinoff’s law firm for malpractice for misrepresenting the case to school officials. The law firm’s insurance carrier paid $1.8 million to the District to settle the malpractice case.
After that malpractice claim, Shinoff's long-time law firm, Stutz Artiano Shinoff & Holtz, downsized when several lawyers left. Shinoff's now-smaller firm is known as Artiano Shinoff.
