Jenna Amacher v. City of Tullahoma, Tennessee; Jennifer Moody; Ray Knowis; Scott Van Velsor; Jim Woodard

RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLICATION
Pursuant to Sixth Circuit I.O.P. 32.1(b)
File Name: 26a0183p.06
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT
JENNA AMACHER,
Plaintiff-Appellant,
v.
CITY OF TULLAHOMA, TENNESSEE; JENNIFER MOODY;
RAY KNOWIS; SCOTT VAN VELSOR; JIM WOODARD,
Defendants-Appellees.
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No. 25-5917
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee at Winchester.
No. 4:23-cv-00040—Travis Randall McDonough, District Judge.
Argued: June 3, 2026
Decided and Filed: June 25, 2026
Before: SUTTON, Chief Judge; LARSEN and MURPHY, Circuit Judges.
_________________
COUNSEL
ARGUED: Drew Justice, JUSTICE LAW OFFICE, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, for Appellant.
McKenna G. Williams, HOWELL & FISHER, PLLC, Nashville, Tennessee, for Appellees City
of Tullahoma, Jennifer Moody, and Ray Knowis. Daniel C. Headrick, JOHNSON EVANS &
HEADRICK, P.C., Knoxville, Tennessee, for Appellees Jim Woodard and Scott Van Velsor.
ON BRIEF: Drew Justice, JUSTICE LAW OFFICE, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, for Appellant.
McKenna G. Williams, Robert M. Burns, HOWELL & FISHER, PLLC, Nashville, Tennessee,
for Appellees City of Tullahoma, Jennifer Moody, and Ray Knowis. Daniel C. Headrick,
Matthew J. Evans, JOHNSON EVANS & HEADRICK, P.C., Knoxville, Tennessee, for
Appellees Jim Woodard and Scott Van Velsor.
>

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_________________
OPINION
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SUTTON, Chief Judge. Jenna Amacher served as an alderman on the City Council of
Tullahoma, Tennessee. After she sold her home in the City and started living outside the city
limits, the district attorney and two residents challenged her eligibility for office in Tennessee
court based on the City’s residency requirement. When their effort failed because Amacher had
done “just enough” to show that she planned to return to the City in the future, R.86 at 71,
Amacher sued the two citizens, the City’s mayor, and its administrator for retaliating against her
for her political and other speech. The district court granted summary judgment to the
defendants. Because probable cause supported the quo warranto petition, it does not provide a
cognizable basis for a First Amendment retaliation claim in this setting. We affirm.
I.
In August 2020, the people of Tullahoma elected Amacher to a three-year term as an
alderman. Amacher did not hide from controversy, whether in that role or outside of it. One
example: She opposed a local redevelopment plan that many local leaders and residents
supported. Another example: She took more conservative political positions than her fellow
aldermen. Still another example: She posted a photo on Facebook of her and her sister-in-law at
a “redneck Christmas party” posing in front of a Confederate flag with a sign that read, “[w]e go
together like cocaine and waffles.” R.56 ¶ 3; R.86 at 104–05. Her political stances alienated
some residents and officials, and the photo “shocked” Tullahoma Mayor Ray Knowis, R.92-2
at 6, and “bother[ed]” City Administrator Jennifer Moody, R.92-1 at 23.
The Tullahoma charter requires aldermen to live within the City and provides that an
alderman “vacates” her office by moving her residence outside of the City. R.86 at 21. In
February 2021, Amacher sold her home in Tullahoma and moved into her grandfather’s former
house, which is located outside of the City. For about six months, she did not own any property
in the City. In August 2021, Amacher bought an unimproved lot in the City, on which she
planned to build a new house. But the plan did not come to fruition for some time. She started

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construction in the Fall of 2021, suffered delays due to a tornado, then experienced further delays
due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Construction did not begin in earnest until early 2023. In the
meantime, Amacher continued to live outside of the City, between at least February 2021 and
March 2023, while remaining an alderman.
In February 2022, Amacher ran for a seat on the county commission and listed her house-
free property in the City as her residence. The designation raised the suspicion of the county
election commissioner who questioned whether Amacher lived in the district. The commissioner
told Moody, the city administrator, about Amacher’s uncertain residency status. In May 2022,
Amacher lost the primary election for the county commission seat.
Even so, a local resident, Scott Van Velsor, collected 270 signatures to ask the district
attorney to investigate Amacher’s residency because she continued to serve as a Tullahoma
alderman. In October 2022, with the support of several citizens, the district attorney sought a
writ of quo warranto from a Tennessee state court, requesting Amacher’s removal from office
due to her lack of residency in the City. In December, the district attorney amended the petition
to name Van Velsor as the relator and another Tullahoma resident, Jim Woodard, as the
guarantor for a $500 bond to cover court costs if the petition failed.
The Tennessee court found Amacher’s claims of living on the undeveloped plot of land in
the City “unconvincing and damaging to her credibility.” R.86 at 70. But that did not end the
inquiry. Tennessee law, the state court explained, deems someone a resident of a city so long as
they intend to return there. See Tenn. Code § 2-2-122(a)(4). That legal test prompted this
factual question: Did Amacher intend to move back to the City? On that score, Amacher did
“just enough” by trying to build a habitable residence on her lot to “manifest her intent to” live in
the City again. R.86 at 71. The court found that she remained a Tullahoma resident and denied
the petition.
Amacher’s victory did not bring peace. After the state court’s ruling, Amacher sued the
City, Knowis, Moody, Van Velsor, and Woodard for retaliating, and conspiring to retaliate,
against her for exercising her free-speech rights under the First (and Fourteenth) Amendment.
See 42 U.S.C. § 1983. She added a state law malicious prosecution claim against the individual

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defendants. The defendants moved for summary judgment. The district court granted it,
concluding that Amacher failed to show that the defendants conspired to file the quo warranto
petition or that they sought to retaliate against her federally protected speech. After dismissing
the federal claim, the court declined as a matter of discretion to resolve her state law claim for
malicious prosecution, permitting Amacher to file it in state court.
II.
A.
To show that the defendants retaliated against her exercise of First Amendment rights,
Amacher must establish at a minimum that she engaged in protected speech, that she experienced
an “adverse action,” and that opposition to her speech by the defendants caused the adverse
action. DeLanis v. Metro. Gov’t of Nashville & Davidson Cnty., 160 F.4th 732, 742 (6th Cir.
2025). Additional requirements come into play if the claimant bases her First Amendment
retaliation claim on a legal action taken against her by the government. If the adverse action
allegedly prompted by the claimant’s free speech was a criminal prosecution or an arrest by law
enforcement officers, for example, the claimant must show the absence of probable cause as an
element of the claim. Hartman v. Moore, 547 U.S. 250, 258–59, 261 (2006) (prosecution);
Nieves v. Bartlett, 587 U.S. 391, 401–02 (2019) (arrest).
At stake today is whether a no-probable-cause requirement applies in the context of the
quo warranto petition that the district attorney filed against Amacher. We conclude that it is an
element of the claim that the plaintiff must prove.
When Congress enacted § 1983 in 1871, “there was no common law tort for retaliatory”
government actions “based on protected speech.” Nieves, 587 U.S. at 405. That requires us to
look “to the common law torts that provide the ‘closest analogy’ to [a] retaliatory” quo warranto
petition. Id. (quoting Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477, 484 (1994)).
A common law malicious prosecution claim offers the best analogy to a quo warranto
action. At common law, and today, a malicious prosecution claim challenges the “wrongful
institution of legal process.” Id. (emphasis deleted) (quotation omitted). That action in material

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ways parallels Amacher’s claim that the defendants improperly initiated the quo warranto
petition against her. A quo warranto action forces an officeholder to answer (in English) this
question: By what right do you hold this position? Black’s Law Dictionary (12th ed. 2024). In
the absence of a satisfactory answer—because, say, the individual does not meet the
qualifications for office—the officeholder loses the position. Tenn. Code § 29-35-116. While
this civil action, if successful, would not lead to a criminal sentence, it would have serious
consequences for the individual and for the community: removal of a democratically elected
official from office. Whether it is misuse of the government’s power to criminally prosecute
someone or to unfairly remove them from office, both situations turn on government officials
who misuse their power to take action on behalf of a community against an individual in the
community.
Amacher’s own actions in this case confirm the comparison. The only state law claim
that Amacher continues to pursue in this case is a state law tort claim for malicious prosecution.
In addition to her § 1983 claim, she sued the defendants for common law malicious prosecution
based on the same allegations underlying her free-speech retaliation claim. Even in a free-
speech case, actions usually speak louder than words.
Amacher thus must meet the elements of a common law malicious prosecution claim. At
common law, as well as today, a malicious prosecution claim required the claimant to disprove
that probable cause supported the allegedly retaliatory action. Nieves, 587 U.S. at 405–06.
Amacher must do the same to succeed on her retaliation claim.
Another analogous common law tort, for what it is worth, supports this no-probable-
cause requirement. The common law provided a claim based on “wrongful civil proceedings.”
Pro. Real Est. Invs., Inc. v. Columbia Pictures Indus., Inc., 508 U.S. 49, 62 (1993); DeMartini v.
Town of Gulf Stream, 942 F.3d 1277, 1308–09 (11th Cir. 2019). Much like Amacher’s First
Amendment claim, this tort involved a complaint that the defendant baselessly sued the plaintiff
for an “improper, malicious purpose.” Pro. Real Est. Invs., 508 U.S. at 62. And much like
malicious prosecution, this tort required a plaintiff to prove that the challenged lawsuit “lacked
probable cause.” Id.

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Other considerations reinforce this conclusion. Whether the district attorney had
probable cause to bring this quo warranto petition provides “a distinct body of highly valuable
circumstantial evidence available and apt to prove or disprove retaliatory causation” in all cases
based on an allegedly retaliatory civil action. Hartman, 547 U.S. at 261; see Nieves, 587 U.S.
at 400. That is particularly true when the underlying adverse action by the government involves
the actions of an independent third party. Hartman, 547 U.S. at 261–63. Just as the government
investigators sued in Hartman acted through a third party (the prosecutor) to bring the allegedly
retaliatory prosecution, the defendant citizens and public officials in this case allegedly worked
through a third party (the Tullahoma district attorney) to file the quo warranto petition against
Amacher. Id. at 262–63; see also DeMartini, 942 F.3d at 1304. In Hartman, as in this case, the
claimant did not sue the prosecutor because prosecutorial immunity applies to the decision
whether to bring the action. 547 U.S. at 261–62. The same complications that surround a free-
speech retaliation claim arising from the actions of a third party to prosecute someone occur in
an action premised on the decision of a third party to bring a quo warranto action. Id. In both
settings, a no-probable-cause imperative justifiably undergirds each claim.
All of this makes particular sense in a case in which a government official sues citizens
on free-speech retaliation grounds. Surely those citizens have free-speech rights of their own,
including the right to challenge on reasonable grounds whether an officeholder meets the
requirements of office. Any other approach would enable Amacher—after taking a provocative
stand on an issue of the day—to transform the First Amendment’s “shield” for free speech into a
“sword” an elected official could wield against political opponents. Whiting v. City of Athens,
170 F.4th 439, 452 (6th Cir. 2026). Take today’s setting. Without a no-probable-cause
requirement, this lawsuit would allow an elected official to punish political opponents, including
citizens, for exercising their First Amendment right to petition a state court. See Borough of
Duryea v. Guarnieri, 564 U.S. 379, 387 (2011); but see id. at 403 (Scalia, J., concurring in the
judgment in part and dissenting in part) (doubting whether the right to petition extended beyond
the executive and legislative branches to the courts). Who, it is fair to ask, is retaliating against
whom in this situation?

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Consistent with the common law, a claimant like Amacher must show that the allegedly
retaliatory lawsuit lacked probable cause. See Nieves, 587 U.S. at 400; Hartman, 547 U.S. at
263; DeMartini, 942 F.3d at 1304; see also Knology, Inc. v. Insight Commc’ns Co., 393 F.3d
656, 658 (6th Cir. 2004) (noting that Noerr-Pennington immunity, which contains a similar
probable cause requirement, may extend beyond antitrust actions to § 1983 claims); Pro. Real
Est. Invs., 508 U.S. at 59, 62 n.7; E. R.R. Presidents Conf. v. Noerr Motor Freight, Inc., 365 U.S.
127, 144 (1961); Cox v. Ruckel, No. 23-5698, 2025 WL 2603787, at *14 n.7 (6th Cir. Sept. 9,
2025). To establish a lack of probable cause, Amacher must demonstrate that the defendants did
not have “a reasonable belief” that the quo warranto action had even “a chance” of succeeding.
Pro. Real Est. Invs., 508 U.S. at 62–63 & n.7 (quotation omitted); see DeMartini, 942 F.3d at
1301. Probable cause exists, and Amacher’s First Amendment claim fails, so long as there was a
“probability or substantial chance” that the Tennessee court would find that Amacher forfeited
her eligibility for office. See Alford v. Deffendoll, 165 F.4th 490, 497 (6th Cir. 2026) (quotation
omitted). That is not a “high bar.” Lester v. Roberts, 986 F.3d 599, 608 (6th Cir. 2021) (quoting
Kaley v. United States, 571 U.S. 320, 338 (2014)); see DeMartini, 942 F.3d at 1301.
B.
Judged by these standards, Amacher’s claim fails. She has not shown that the quo
warranto petition lacked probable cause. She points to her opposition to the redevelopment plan,
her voting record as an alderman, her Confederate-flag photo and accompanying statements, her
criticism of Tullahoma officials, and her partisan affiliation as protected speech. And she points
to the quo warranto petition as an adverse action taken in response to that speech. (More on the
adverse action requirement in a few pages.) Even if we accept these premises of her claim—
protected speech followed by an adverse action—the claim snags on the imperative of showing
that the quo warranto petition lacked probable cause.
The quo warranto petition sought to challenge Amacher’s eligibility to serve as an
alderman based on reasonable concerns about her residency. Although the petition failed, it
presented a fair ground for disqualifying her, as the state judge acknowledged. Recall that the
City’s charter required Amacher to remain a resident of the City to retain her office. She sold
her only home in the City, moved outside of the City limits, and did not own any property in the

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City for six months. Even when she bought a vacant lot, she did not begin meaningful
construction of the home for a year and a half. That “plodding effort” to build a house in the
City, the Tennessee court found, was “just enough” to show that she intended to return. R.86
at 71. She added to the uncertainty about her residency in the interim by refusing to say where
she lived and by dubiously claiming she spent a significant number of nights on the unimproved
lot. The Tennessee court agreed that Amacher’s lack of “transparency” about where she lived
contributed to the “trouble” with establishing her residency. R.86 at 71.
These realities combine to show that the citizens and public officials could fairly doubt
that she intended to return to the City. The quo warranto petition, though unsuccessful,
presented a serious and legitimate reason for challenging her eligibility. See Pro. Real Est. Invs.,
508 U.S. at 62–63 & n.7; see DeMartini, 942 F.3d at 1301. There was, in short, probable cause
to support it. We do not, and should not, lightly penalize the efforts of citizens, or for that matter
government officials, to challenge the bona fides of an elected official’s debatable claim to
office.
Amacher responds along several lines, none altering this conclusion. She argues that the
quo warranto petition should not receive a presumption of regularity, as the criminal prosecution
did in Hartman, due to the independent role of the prosecutor in initiating the prosecution at
issue in Hartman. See Hartman, 547 U.S. at 262–63. This argument runs into two obstacles.
First, the Tullahoma district attorney did approve the quo warranto petition against Amacher,
mirroring this aspect of Hartman. Tenn. Code § 29-35-101, -109, -110 (quo warranto petitions
may be brought “in the name of the state” “at the relation of a private individual”); Heredia v.
Gibbons, 2019 WL 3216623, at *4 (Tenn. Ct. App. July 17, 2019) (Tennessee law “does not
authorize private individuals to bring suit in the nature of a quo warranto proceeding.”). Second,
the independent role of a prosecutor is not the Rosetta Stone that Amacher claims it is. The no-
probable-cause requirement applies equally to retaliatory arrest claims, the Supreme Court has
made clear, and they do not involve the participation of an independent prosecutor. Nieves, 587
U.S. at 402.
Even if probable cause pierces free-speech retaliation claims in this setting, Amacher
adds, no probable cause in fact supported the quo warranto petition. She points out that

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Tennessee law does not define residency based solely on where one currently lives but also on
one’s future intent to return to a place. See Tenn. Code § 2-2-122(a)(4). True. But that shows
only that this case turns on a contested factual question about Amacher’s intent. Reasonable
minds could fairly view the relevant facts differently. She did not own any property in the City
for months. After eventually buying some property, she then took well over a year to begin
sustained progress on a house in the City. All the while, she maintained that she lived on a lot
without a home, leading to understandable doubts about her authentic plans. These facts all
suffice to sink her claim that no probable cause existed for the quo warranto action.
Amacher persists that she always publicly maintained that she intended to move back
within the City limits. But she provides no good reason why the defendants had to take her word
for it. In view of her evasive and dubious residency claims, she gave the citizens and public
officials legitimate grounds for doubting her statements on the matter. Unlike a college student
staying in a dorm during the semester or a soldier deployed overseas, as she analogizes her
situation, Amacher gave the people of the City reason after reason to doubt her future plans. The
state court acknowledged as much when it found that Amacher had “damaged[ed] . . . her
credibility” by her actions and statements and that the intent question came down to a close call
in which Amacher had done “just enough” to maintain her residency and keep her seat. R.86
at 70–71. The evidence shows that the defendants had “a reasonable belief” that the petition had
at least “a chance” of succeeding. Pro. Real Est. Invs., 508 U.S. at 62–63 (quotation omitted);
see DeMartini, 942 F.3d at 1301. Once the defendants’ lawsuit is shown to be premised on
reasonable grounds, it makes no difference whether the citizens’ and public officials’ decision to
file the lawsuit was also motivated by free-speech, or for that matter political, retaliation. See
Hartman, 547 U.S. at 265–66; Nieves, 587 U.S. at 401–04, 408; DeMartini, 942 F.3d at 1304.
Amacher falls back on a different district attorney’s decision not to pursue criminal voter-
fraud or fraud-on-the-public charges against Amacher stemming from her failed campaign for a
county commission seat. But the discretionary decision of one prosecutor not to file criminal
charges, especially after the issue became partially “moot” when Amacher lost the county
commissioner primary, does not indicate that another district attorney lacked probable cause to
challenge her residency in a quo warranto petition. R.92-1 at 32.

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C.
A few words are in order about a few issues that we leave untouched. Amacher does not
claim that any defendant dangled the quo warranto petition over her head to coerce her speech or
manipulate her work on the city council. Such a claim might more closely resemble the common
law tort of abuse of process, which may be filed in response to a claimant who has an improper
“ulterior” motive in using a legitimate legal proceeding and who has no intent to prevail in it.
See Bickerstaff v. Lucarelli, 830 F.3d 388, 399–400 (6th Cir. 2016); see also Givens v. Mullikin
ex rel. Est. of McElwaney, 75 S.W.3d 383, 400 (Tenn. 2002). In that setting, probable cause may
not provide a complete defense, see Bickerstaff, 830 F.3d at 400, as it clearly does in a free-
speech retaliation claim that more closely resembles a claim for malicious prosecution or
wrongful use of civil proceedings.
Amacher does not claim that the public-official defendants unequally enforced the
residency requirement, filing a quo warranto petition only against Amacher but not against other
elected officials facing similar question marks about their residency. See Nieves, 587 U.S. at 407
(“[T]he no-probable-cause requirement should not apply when a plaintiff presents objective
evidence that he was arrested when otherwise similarly situated individuals not engaged in the
same sort of protected speech had not been.”).
Amacher does not claim that the quo warranto petition emerged from an official policy to
retaliate against her proved by indisputable “objective evidence.” Lozman v. Riviera Beach, 585
U.S. 87, 99–101 (2018) (retaliatory arrest claimants do not need to disprove probable cause when
a series of extraordinary circumstances converge).
Last reservation of all: We save for another day whether a fair-grounded effort to unseat
an elected official amounts to an “adverse action” in the first place. The answer is not obvious in
view of the twin American tenets that “legislative power . . . belongs to the people,” and
individual legislators have “no personal right to it.” Nev. Comm’n on Ethics v. Carrigan, 564
U.S. 117, 125–26 (2011); see also Doe v. Reed, 561 U.S. 186, 220–23 (2010) (Scalia, J.,
concurring in the judgment) (finding “no precedent from this Court holding that legislating is
protected by the First Amendment”).

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III.
Amacher separately challenges one of the district court’s discovery rulings. She argues
that she needed more time to complete discovery because she missed the opportunity to depose
three witnesses. The district court denied a joint motion to extend discovery by two months as
well as a follow-up motion by Amacher for an unspecified amount of extra time. Parties may
ask a district court to modify a scheduling order “only for good cause.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 16(b)(4).
We review a district court’s scheduling order for abuse of discretion, appreciating the “wide
discretion” that trial judges have “to manage their own dockets.” Taylor v. Bristol-Myers Squibb
Co., 93 F.4th 339, 349 (6th Cir. 2024) (quotation omitted).
No abuse of discretion occurred. The district court set its initial scheduling order in
March 2024, giving the parties a year to complete discovery by March 3, 2025. In January 2025,
the court granted a two-and-a-half-month extension to May 19. The parties asked to change that
deadline again just a week before it expired. The district court rejected the motion.
The problem for Amacher is that she had plenty of time to complete discovery and to take
depositions before then. Her inability to complete the task in the 14 months available reflects her
lack of diligence, not the fault of the district court for standing by its schedule to ensure the case
proceeded efficiently and consistent with Rule 1 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
See Inge v. Rock Fin. Corp., 281 F.3d 613, 625–26 (6th Cir. 2002).
Amacher responds that the defendants caused the discovery delays. She says that they
took months to respond to a document request and adds that their eventual answers proved
inadequate. But this contention by itself does not explain why she could not take the relevant
depositions.
Amacher, at all events, caused delays of her own in proceeding haltingly to address the
defendants’ delay. Amacher sent her document requests to the defendants in October 2024 but
did not move to compel a full response until May 5, 2025, just two weeks before the already
postponed discovery deadline. She admits that she was not “maximally diligent,” Appellant’s
Br. 37, in pursuing the documents that somehow delayed the depositions and that she shared
responsibility for “conduct[ing] discovery too slowly,” R.82 at 4. That undercuts her effort to

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show good cause for delaying the case still more. And that makes it difficult to show that the
court abused its discretion in finding that “her delay and her failure to use motions practice
available to her during the discovery period” served as the “primary cause” of her failure to hold
all the depositions she had planned. R.89 at 3.
Appellate courts should commend district courts, not criticize them, when they honor the
mandate to “secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination” of cases brought before
them. Fed. R. Civ. P. 1. It is never “just” to enable slow and expensive litigation. Discovery
without end, or more fairly discovery without reasonable ends, drives up the costs of litigation,
impedes the prompt resolution of disputes, and incentivizes citizens to rely on other forms of
dispute resolution to handle their disagreements. The district court fairly and commendably
handled this discovery dispute.
We affirm.

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