PASADENA, Calif. (CN) - An attorney for Los Angeles Sheriff Leroy Baca on Thursday urged the 9th Circuit to grant immunity to the sheriff in a federal class action that claims thousands of people have been falsely arrested on warrants for other people.
Lead plaintiff Reginald Lenard Smith in 2011 sued Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, Baca and the LAPD, for failure to train officers how to access unique identifying numbers on computer systems to determine the subjects of arrest warrants.
California's unique identifiers are called CII numbers, while Los Angeles County uses LA Main numbers. The numbers match biometric identifiers to fingerprints. Like fingerprints, no two people have the same biometric identifier.
Smith claimed that in 2007 he found himself shipped off to the Los Angeles County jail after he was stopped by police in Antioch, Tenn., for a minor traffic violation and mistaken for a different Reggie Smith.
Smith's namesake had an outstanding arrest warrant for failing to appear in court to face sexual battery charges. Smith shared the same name and birthday as the subject of the warrant. Both men are black.
Authorities sent Smith to the Los Angeles County jail, where he was held for 13 days before a state court judge ordered his release on Aug. 28, 2007. Though the Superior Court reissued the warrant, officials did not make clear that Smith was not the subject of the warrant, Smith said. Nor did officials include Smith's biometric numbers on the warrant.
In early 2011, Smith was arrested on the same warrant. That year, the federal government denied his passport application, believing that he was the warrant's subject.
Once an arrest is made, Smith said, the warrant is often removed from information systems used to check for outstanding warrants.
"So if the wrong person is arrested on the warrant, the warrant's intended subject will no longer face arrest on the warrant. In other words, because of defendants' indifference criminals get a free pass," the lawsuit states.
Smith estimated that thousands of people were affected. An average of two people a day are released from county custody because of defective warrants, he claims in the lawsuit.
He asked the court to order county officials exclude people from warrants after they have been cleared. He also sought an order requiring the county to train its personnel to include identifiers from other agencies, record aliases for the subject of the warrant, and include the names, birthdates, and fingerprint identifiers of those who are cleared.
U.S. District Judge Gary Allen Feess ruled on Sept. 11, 2012 that Smith had failed to make clear that the warrants are invalid under the Fourth Amendment. But he also found that Smith's civil rights under the 14th Amendment may been violated because he was unable to secure a U.S. passport.
The judge therefore denied Sheriff Baca's request for qualified immunity.
On Thursday morning at the 9th Circuit courthouse, Baca's attorney Scott Caron, with Glendale firm Lawrence Beach Allen & Choi, asked the court to reverse.
In an opening brief to the court, Caron had argued that Feess' ruling "sets a higher standard" on what information should be listed on an arrest warrant under the particularity requirement of the Fourth Amendment.
"The Fourth Amendment particularity requirement would become a dead letter, and take a perpetual back seat to Fourteenth Amendment procedural due process," Caron argued in his brief .
