Case dismissed!
CHICAGO — The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit released its opinion on former Hall High School teacher Gina Purvis’ lawsuit against former Hall administrators and former Spring Valley Police Chief Doug Bernabei.
According to the ruling, former Superintendent Dan Oest, former Principal Patti Lunn, and former Dean of Students Gary Vicini all were entitled to qualified immunity and that Bernabei had probable cause to arrest Purvis.
“The appellate court found in favor of all the defendants,” said David Heilman, lawyer for Oest, Lunn and Vicini. “The case is over barring any appeals.”
In December 2004, Purvis was indicted on charges of criminal sexual conduct with a 15-year-old male student. She was acquitted on Oct. 31, 2005, and nine days later, filed suit against the school, Oest, Lunn, Vicini, the city of Spring Valley and Bernabei.
The case has been working its way through the courts ever since.
In January 2009, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois issued a written opinion on the case, removing the school board as a defendant but also rejecting claims that Oest, Lunn and Vicini were protected by qualified immunity. The court also questioned whether Bernabei had deprived Purvis of due process.
But now the Appellate Court has reversed the rulings of the district court.
In Monday’s ruling, the court wrote the case involved “a most unfortunate series of events that raise a variety of challenging legal and factual questions.”
The court found there was an issue as to whether the school’s investigation was fundamentally biased and corrupted DCFS and police investigations. Vicini was directed to investigate the rumors about Purvis and a student, despite the fact that Purvis had reported Vicini for his alleged sexual harassment of a female student the year before.
The court found the evidence supported a finding that Vicini was biased against Purvis, writing “It is troubling indeed that the principal, Lunn, would place Vicini in a position in which he exercised at least some influence over the course of the school investigation.”
But it was under different grounds that the court found Oest, Vicini and Lunn had a right to qualified immunity, which protects government officials from liability.
For Oest, the court found he was not aware of the potential conflict of interest involving Vicini, writing “It is clear therefore that a reasonable person in his situation would not have known that appointing Lunn and Vicini to investigate the veracity of the rumors would have involved a fundamentally-biased process.”
However, the court also found that Lunn and Vicini were also entitled to qualified immunity, writing “There is no case law ... that demonstrates that Purvis’s constitutional rights would have been violated by reporting her to a body that would perform an independent investigation.”
The court found that Lunn and Vicini could have assumed the subsequent, independent DCFS investigation that followed the school’s investigation would have “foreclosed any constitutional violation.”
Regarding Bernabei, the court found he had probable cause to arrest Purvis, citing a highly detailed statement from the alleged victim and “voluminous circumstantial evidence of an improper relationship.”
Following the release of the ruling, Heilman said he was very pleased with the ruling. Calls to Purvis’ lawyer were not returned by press time.
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