LOS ANGELES (CN) — The California Supreme Court on Thursday reiterated the limits that state law sets for law enforcement to argue that they are immune from lawsuits over harm done when they are carrying out their job.
In an unanimous decision, the state's top court rejected the argument by Riverside County that its sheriff deputies couldn't be held liable for the emotional distress of the wife of a man who had been left lying in plain sight with his genitals exposed for almost eight hours after he had been fatally shot.
The particular provision of the California Government Claims Act that the county relied on, and which both the trial court and the court of appeals had agreed shielded the deputies from liability, pertained to claims for wrongful prosecution only and couldn't be extended to cover all official police conduct, the court said, such as investigating a crime.
"While other provisions of the Government Claims Act may confer immunity for certain investigatory actions, section 821.6 does not broadly immunize police officers or other public employees for any and all harmful actions they may take in the course of investigating crime," Associate Justice Leondra Kruger wrote in reversing the lower courts' decisions.
Although the limits of this section of state law had been articulated by the California Supreme Court as far back as 1974, a series of intermediate decisions by state appellate courts have relied on broader interpretations of 821.6 to throw out misconduct lawsuits against law enforcement that didn't pertain to actual prosecutions.
Thursday's decision won't necessary open the floodgates for new litigation because, as the court pointed out, there are other defenses still available to win dismissal of police misconduct claims, said Richard Antognini, the attorney for Dora Leon who argued the case before California Supreme Court.
"It's not going to change the landscape," Antognini said. "But it will make some of these lawsuits easier to bring and to prosecute."
Dora Leon sued after her husband, José Leon, was fatally shot in 2017 by a neighbor in the Cherry Valley mobile home park where they lived. When the first deputies arrived shortly after the shooting, new shots rang out nearby and the deputies dragged José's lifeless body behind their SUV, causing his pants to fall down and exposing his genitals. He was left lying like that until the evening as law enforcement evacuated the park and investigated the shooting.
A trial court judge and the appellate court agreed that Dora couldn't sue for negligence and emotional distress over the deputies' failure to cover up her husband's body because, they said, all this occurred during the course of the deputies’ official investigation of the shooting.
However, one of the judges on the appellate panel two years ago, Associate Justice Michael Raphael, while concurring in the dismissal of Dora Leon's lawsuit, wrote a separate opinion to point out how California's court of appeals have been interpreting the law differently from the state's supreme court.
Raphael noted in particular that the federal courts have interpreted the California statute along the lines of the 1974 California Supreme Court decision, limiting immunity under 821.6 to wrongful prosecution claims, which meant that state courts and federal courts in California used different standards for deciding police misconduct claims under the same state law.
"If the negligence claim in this case were adjudicated in our federal district court, it appears that section 821.6 would permit it," Raphael noted.
Raphael's observations teed-up the trip to the California Supreme Court to clarify the limits of the immunity defense under this section of state law, Antognini said.
Lawyers representing Riverside County didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.
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