A federal court in Texas has entered judgment in favor of the City of Yoakum in a First Amendment lawsuit brought by a woman whose dispute with a fire department paramedic began during an emergency childbirth call in 2017 and continued for more than eight years.

The suit grew out of Karissa Johnson’s efforts to publicly criticize paramedic Steven Stary over his handling of the emergency and his alleged disclosure of information about the incident afterward. Stary resigned from the city in January 2018, but Johnson continued her efforts to raise her complaints about him at city council meetings, eventually filing suit against Stary, the city, and several city officials.

Here is how the court explained the facts:

• On June 26, 2017, Karissa Johnson experienced complications while giving birth at her home in Yoakum, Texas, and required emergency medical assistance.
• Several emergency medical technicians responded, including Steven Stary, an EMT paramedic employed by the City’s fire department.
• Johnson alleges that, instead of immediately attending to her medical needs, Stary argued with her husband and the attending licensed midwives regarding the emergency response and position in which she should be transported in the ambulance to the hospital.
• Johnson further alleges that she ultimately delivered a “very blue baby girl” and that the attending physician informed her that the child would not have survived had there been any further delay in reaching the hospital for an emergency cesarean section.
• Johnson contends that Stary had “delayed getting [her] to the hospital on one of the scariest days of her life by needlessly arguing, debating, and by trying to force her into a position that he should have known would be dangerous for the baby per standard EMT training.”
• After the incident, Stary allegedly spread rumors about Johnson and her husband to unrelated third parties, criticized her husband’s emergency call, and identified her family by name. According to Johnson, “word travels in a small town,” and she soon learned that details of the emergency response were circulating within the community harming her family’s reputation.
• In early October 2017, Johnson asked City Manager Kevin Coleman to place her on the Yoakum city council agenda so that she could publicly complain about Stary during the October 10, 2017, city council meeting.
• City Manager Coleman denied the request, explaining that complaints concerning City employees would not be heard during open-session city council meetings.
• According to Johnson, City Manager Coleman informed her that citizens could publicly criticize only the city manager because the city council supervised that position, but complaints concerning other City employees would be handled privately through the city manager because personnel matters fell within his authority alone, not the city council’s.
• Although Johnson was later permitted to address City Manager Coleman during the November 14, 2017, city council meeting, she alleges that she was not allowed to discuss Stary or mention him by name during her speech.
• Stary subsequently resigned from City employment on January 10, 2018.
• Johnson alleges that she was again prevented from publicly criticizing Stary during a May 8, 2018, city council meeting under the City’s unwritten policy governing public comments.
• During that meeting, Johnson attempted to discuss Stary while praising other emergency personnel involved in her daughter’s delivery.
• Johnson alleges that Mayor Anita Rodriguez interrupted her remarks by calling a point of order after Johnson mentioned Stary, and that City Clerk Bowe stated that Johnson’s criticism was not an appropriate subject for discussion at the May 2018 city council meeting.
• Johnson further alleges that City Clerk Bowe confronted her outside City Hall following the May 2018 city council meeting, and publicly criticized her efforts to raise concerns about Stary, and that City officials caused a police officer to follow her vehicle after she departed.

Johnson filed suit in December 2018. Her claims included a First Amendment challenge to the city’s restrictions on public comments at council meetings, a First Amendment retaliation claim, and a claim against Stary alleging that his disclosure of information concerning her medical treatment violated HIPAA. Over the ensuing years, the claims against Stary and the individual city officials were dismissed, as was Johnson’s retaliation claim.

In 2021, the Fifth Circuit concluded that Johnson could not maintain her retaliation claims against two city officials because she had not suffered an injury that would have chilled a person of ordinary firmness from continuing to speak.

Meanwhile, the city adopted a written policy in 2019 governing citizen comments at council meetings. That shifted the focus of Johnson’s lawsuit from the earlier unwritten policy to whether the new written policy violated the First Amendment. In March 2024, the court dismissed the remaining claims but allowed Johnson to amend her complaint to challenge the 2019 policy.

In August 2025, the court rejected her claim that the policy was unconstitutional on its face, concluding that city council meetings are limited public forums and that the city could impose reasonable, viewpoint-neutral restrictions limiting comments to matters within the council’s authority.

That left Johnson with one avenue to continue the case: a claim that, even if the policy itself was constitutional, the city had applied it to her in an unconstitutional manner. The court initially dismissed that claim because there was no evidence that Johnson had actually attempted to speak under the policy. Johnson subsequently continued requesting opportunities to speak at city council meetings and filed a second amended complaint.

The resulting record proved fatal to her claim. Throughout 2025, the city repeatedly approved Johnson’s requests to speak. She did not attend several of the meetings for which she had been approved, but beginning in June she appeared and spoke at a series of council meetings. In August 2025, she was permitted to criticize City Clerk Theresa Bowe and the city’s public-comment practices. In November, she was permitted to publicly criticize Stary—the former paramedic whose conduct during the 2017 emergency had started the dispute more than eight years earlier. On both occasions, the city gave Johnson more speaking time than ordinarily allowed under the policy.

U.S. District Judge Drew B. Tipton concluded that the evidence simply did not support Johnson’s contention that the city had used the policy to silence her. The city had approved her requests, placed her on meeting agendas, and ultimately allowed her to make the very criticisms that she claimed the city was preventing her from making.

As Judge Tipton explained:

• Taken together, the undisputed evidence shows that the City repeatedly approved Johnson’s requests to speak, including requests to criticize City Clerk Bowe, former City employee Stary, other City officials, and the City’s own public-comment policies.

The court found nothing in the record from which a reasonable factfinder could conclude that the city applied its policy to Johnson in a viewpoint-discriminatory or unreasonable manner. Judge Tipton therefore granted summary judgment to the city on Johnson’s remaining First Amendment claim.