Court sides with Warren in case over firing of police official accused of excessive force

The city of Warren and former Police Commissioner William Dwyer scored a win this month in a legal battle over the firing of former Deputy Police Commissioner Matthew Nichols, who was accused of punching a shoplifting suspect in the throat outside a Lowe's in 2018.

Dwyer dismissed Nichols from the department after the incident and formally discharged him in 2019. Nichols sued Dwyer and the city over his dismissal, leading to a lengthy legal dispute.

That dispute reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which on March 7 upheld a 2022 decision by a U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan judge siding with Warren. The district court had granted Warren's motion for summary judgment, effectively ending Nichols' case.

Attorney Raechel Badalamenti, representing Warren, said she is glad to see the court support the city's decision to fire Nichols.

"I think action was taken against an officer who was in the wrong," Badalamenti said. "Whether he's the deputy commissioner or an officer patrolling the streets, he's got to be held to a high standard, and they held him to it."

Officers offered conflicting accounts of the incident in which Nichols is accused of punching the 56-year-old suspect who was in custody. Some said he punched the suspect while others denied seeing him use excessive force.

Nichols said Monday that the suspect wasn't "cooperating with the officers on the scene as far as being removed from the car." He said all he did was "push the person out of the car."

"I pushed him with my open hand, and he was arrested without further incident, and it was done," Nichols said.

The matter was investigated by two outside police agencies, The News previously reported. The Macomb County Sheriff's Office requested a warrant for aggravated assault. The Macomb County prosecutor denied the request.

Dwyer, who was fired from the city earlier this month, said firing Nichols was the "proper action to take."

"And that was the disciplinary action, the termination of the deputy commissioner, based on the facts presented to me," he said.

Nichols plans to continue fighting. His attorney Jamil Akhtar said he has filed a motion for a rehearing and reconsideration of the case.

Court sides with Warren

After his firing, Nichols filed lawsuits in federal and state court, both of which were largely unsuccessful.

The federal district court dismissed all of his claims, but the appeals court sided with him on one matter in May 2021. The appeals court said that because Nichols was terminated for disciplinary reasons, he should have been entitled to return to Warren's police department's bargaining unit as a lieutenant and be able to use union grievance procedures.

Akhtar contended that ruling meant Nichols should be reinstated, which would allow the mayor to make a decision about whether to keep Nichols in his former role as deputy police commissioner. If the mayor wanted to remove him from the position, Nichols should be able to return to the bargaining unit and have the right to go to arbitration, Akhtar said.

Badalamenti, the city's attorney, said at-will employees like Nichols have no property interest in their position. Employees under a union contract, on the other hand, can sue when they're dismissed because they had a right to their job during the contract period.

With only one of several judgments in Nichols' favor in the appeals court's 2021 ruling, both he and the city filed motions in district court to end the case in their respective favor. Both the district court and the thee judge appeals panel sided with the city, stating Nichols did not have a "property right" to the position of deputy police commissioner.

In her opinion earlier this month, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Jane Stranch said that if Nichols could prove his procedural due process claim, "the proper remedy was to return him to the (protected) bargaining unit position, not the (unprotected) Deputy Commissioner position." But Akhtar, Nichols' attorney, had asked the district court for Nichols to be reinstated as deputy police commissioner.

"The district court therefore did not err in recognizing that the choice by Nichols's counsel to pursue reinstatement to only the Deputy Commissioner position foreclosed Nichols's procedural due process claim," Stranch stated.

The U.S. Court of Appeals also affirmed the district court's denial of several other motions made by Nichols. Nichols had, for example, wanted to amend his complaint to add a First Amendment retaliation claim. But he didn't seek to add that claim until January 2022, which was after the deadline for filing amended complaints and the deadline to inform the court of outstanding issues post-remand.

The appeals court also reversed a district court decision to impose sanctions against Akhtar, who had filed claims under the Fifth Amendment "even though, under clearly established caselaw, that amendment applies only to federal defendants," Stranch said.  

asnabes@detroitnews.com