(CN) — A California woman who spent almost 20 years in prison after she was wrongfully convicted of killing her husband can seek to hold San Diego County liable for the shoddy work by the San Diego Sheriff’s Department Regional Crime Lab, which she says led to her conviction.
U.S. District Judge Cathy Ann Bencivengo on Tuesday denied the county's bid to dismiss the "Monell" claim by Jane Dorotik that puts the county on the hook for the deprivation of her constitutional rights that resulted from the work by the lab's employees.
"Plaintiff’s allegations that the crime lab, at the time of plaintiff’s investigation, was not accredited and had no manual for the proper handling of evidence sufficiently allege a failure to train crime lab employees to avoid constitutional violations committed by those employees," Bencivengo wrote. "Therefore, the court finds that plaintiff states sufficient Monell allegations against the county as the municipality responsible for the crime lab at the time of plaintiff’s investigation."
The Monell doctrine allows victims of police misconduct to sue a municipality provided they can make an argument that their constitutional rights were violated because of the municipality's policies underlying the purported misconduct.
In the case of the San Diego Crime Lab, Dorotik argues in her amended complaint that the county failed to accredit the lab and continued to allow its employees to engage in "subpar performance," which she claims amounted to deliberate indifference by the county to the constitutional rights of criminal suspects like herself.
On a Sunday afternoon more than two decades ago, Jane Dorotik’s husband Robert headed out for a jog. He never returned home. The San Diego Sheriff’s Department later found his body in a wooded area nearby.
Despite her pleas of innocence, she was arrested for the killing and spent nearly two decades behind bars before she was exonerated in 2022 based on findings that the DNA evidence found under Robert’s fingernails did not come from her, that blood analysis used at her trial was faulty, and that the crime lab’s handling of the evidence was problematic.
After her arrest in 2000, the San Diego Sheriff's Department constructed its entire investigation around finding and fabricating evidence to support a detective's hunch that she was guilty, Dorotik says, including relying on the analyses of "untrained, incompetent and unqualified criminalists and evidence technicians," who mishandled critical blood evidence and only selectively DNA tested evidence that could support the detective's hunch.
Dorotik's conviction was vacated in 2020 based on new test results that showed "foreign" DNA under the fingernails of her murdered husband and on the rope tied around his neck, as well as on exculpatory evidence that hadn't been provided to her defense team regarding the crime lab employees who did the forensic testing and "about whose competence and training crime lab supervisors had expressed serious and longstanding concerns."
Prosecutors tried to bring new charges against her in 2020 but ultimately dropped them.
The judge earlier this year allowed Dorotik to proceed with her claims against the various individual county detectives and prosecutors who she claims violated her constitutional rights. Bencivengo threw out the Monell claim against the county as well as the Dorotik's claims against two individual crime lab employees, but allowed her to amend her complaint to further substantiate her claims against these defendants.
In Tuesday's decision, the judge permitted the claims against the county as well as those against the lab employees to proceed.
An attorney for San Diego County didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.
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