Bay Area public defenders on hook for 13-year pretrial detention

OAKLAND, Calif. (CN) — A public defender must face claims they failed in their duty to ensure that a detained man got a speedy trial for more than a decade.

U.S. District Judge Kandis Westmore denied the Alameda County Public Defender’s Office’s motion for summary judgment on claims that it violated a man’s Fourteenth Amendment due process rights. The plaintiff, Francis McArthur, claims the public defender’s office failed to bring him to trial over the 13 years he spent detained on a petition for civil commitment under the Sexually Violent Predator Act.

McArthur filed for damages in the Northern District of California in December 2021, claiming that after his conviction for rape in 1997 and sentencing to eight years in prison, he was placed in civil commitment. He said that he asked for a trial multiple times in different years, and ended up being detained for 13 years due to multiple continuations.

In an 18-page order filed Thursday, Westmore said that McArthur’s claim was timely. She disagreed with Alameda County that he could not claim violations of his Fourteenth Amendment due process right, or that a statute of limitations on fabricated evidence claims applied.

Westmore cited the California Supreme Court’s recent confirmation that people facing commitment have a due process right to a timely trial, and noted it was unclear if McArthur clearly agreed to multiple trial delays.

She also found there is a question as to whether the delays sought by his legal counsel could be attributed to McArthur, such that she thought an order of summary judgment would be “inappropriate.”

Westmore agreed with McArthur’s reliance on the case McDonough v. Smith to prove that his claims of fabricated evidence being used against him were timely. In that case, the Supreme Court found that the statute of limitations for a fabricated evidence claim did not apply until the criminal proceedings terminated in the plaintiff’s favor, even if the plaintiff was never convicted.

McArthur could not have brought his claim until after he was released in September 2020.

“Here, (the) plaintiff’s detention pending his trial lasted for over 13 years, far longer than the applicable statute of limitations,” Westmore said. “Similarly, requiring the plaintiff to have filed a lawsuit by 2011 would have required the district court to stay his case for nine years, placing an unnecessary cost on litigants and the federal courts by ‘cluttering dockets with dormant, unripe cases’ even where a claim necessarily challenged ongoing proceedings.”

In his original complaint, McArthur claims that if a trial had taken place, even if he was found to be a sexual predator, he would have been entitled to petition the court for release each year. Since he never received the trial he repeatedly requested for more than 12 years, he was never eligible to petition for his release, according to the complaint.

McArthur says this proves the county’s public defenders practiced “deliberate indifference to his extraordinarily long and unconstitutional detention.”

A trial on the litigation is set to begin in January 2024.

McArthur has also filed a motion for partial summary judgment. He is represented by the Law Offices of Robyn Fass Wang. Wang said in an email Thursday: “He is happy with today’s ruling. He is grateful to finally have the opportunity for his case to be heard.”

Attorneys for the Alameda County Public Defender’s Office did not respond to requests for comment before press time.

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