WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously overturned a defamation judgment against Air Wisconsin Airlines for reporting one of its pilots as a security risk, which reassured airlines to pass along their suspicions to the Transportation Security Administration.
The pilot, William Hoeper, won a $1.4 million case that the Colorado Supreme Court upheld after airline supervisors reported to TSA that he was "mentally unstable" and could be armed as a passenger on a flight after he failed a simulator test.
But a six-vote majority of the Supreme Court ruled that the law that created the TSA granted immunity "to encourage air carriers and their employees, often in fast-moving situations and with little time to fine-tune their diction, to provide the TSA immediately with information about potential threats."
"No reasonable TSA officer would care whether an angry, potentially armed airline employee had just been fired or merely knew he was about to meet that fate," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the 18-page decision.
Although all nine justices agreed with that result, Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Elena Kagan partially dissented in the case, saying that judging whether the complaints against a passenger were "material" and "false" should be left to a jury and not the high court.