Appellate court rules mostly against Hayden Christmas display

COEUR d’ALENE — An appellate court ruling has cleared the path for a possible new trial in the yearslong legal battle between a former Hayden couple and a homeowners association.

At the center of the dispute is the extravagant, five-night Christmas program hosted by Jeremy and Kristy Morris at their Hayden home, featuring 200,000 lights, dozens of volunteers, costumed characters, a choir and other live music, security personnel, a donkey, a camel and more. Hundreds of people visited the display nightly, some of whom traveled to and from the neighborhood via one of five buses, which parked end-to-end around the Morris home, according to court records. 

The Morris family put on their program in 2015, despite a letter from the West Hayden Estates Homeowners Association advising them that the event would likely violate neighborhood rules. In 2016, they organized an even bigger event. 

The Morrises filed a federal lawsuit against the homeowners association, arguing that the entity had discriminated against them because of their Christian faith by attempting to stop them from putting on the Christmas program.

In 2018, a federal jury returned a verdict finding that the West Hayden Estates Homeowners Association had discriminated against Jeremy and Kristy Morris, in part because of their religion, both before and after they purchased their home. The jury also awarded the Morris family $75,000. 

In a rare move, U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill threw out the jury’s decision, as well as the $75,000 award, concluding that the evidence did not support the allegations of religious discrimination and that the jury had reached “a legally unsupportable verdict.” 

Winmill had concluded after trial that the homeowners association was “unfairly prejudiced by the admission of a great deal of evidence” that jurors should never have heard, including testimony about “threats against the Morrises by other homeowners” in the neighborhood. 

Morris appealed and arguments were heard in 2020. 

Four years later, the appellate judges have agreed that Winmill had the authority and the grounds to hold that “the jury’s verdict was against the clear weight of the evidence.” 

Still, “viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the Morrises,” the panel concluded that there was evidence supporting the jury’s conclusion that the HOA’s conduct was at least partly motivated by the family’s religious expression. For that reason, the panel held that Winmill should not have overturned the jury’s decision on that legal argument. 

“The panel held that a reasonable jury could find that the HOA interfered with the Morrises’ right to purchase and enjoy their home free from discrimination,” Judge Marsha Berzon wrote in part. 

The three-judge panel affirmed that Morris may seek a new trial on those narrow grounds, though the ruling noted the district court’s observation that Jeremy Morris’ testimony was “inconsistent” with evidence and his witnesses were not credible. 

Jeremy Morris “often downplayed the scale of his Christmas program in his testimony,” the panel noted. For example, he testified that he left the 200,000 Christmas lights on past 8 p.m. only on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day of one year, but he had advertised on Facebook that the lights would remain on until 10 p.m. Dec. 23 to Christmas Day in 2016.

“So, on the one hand, Jeremy Morris’s testimony depicted the Christmas program as less disruptive than the documentary evidence demonstrated and painted the HOA as arbitrarily enforcing the (covenants, conditions, and restrictions) against him,” the panel noted. “On the other hand, the testimony of Jennifer Scott and the HOA’s other witnesses, the district court believed, was credible. That testimony supported the conclusion that the board did not have a discriminatory motive for opposing the Christmas program.”

In 2022, Jeremy Morris announced in a public YouTube video that he intended to leave Idaho.