San Francisco attempts to dodge trial for wrongful arrest, conviction of man imprisoned for decades

OAKLAND, Calif. (CN) — San Francisco asked a federal judge Thursday to rule in favor of the city on a man’s claims that police and investigators used unconstitutional methods to wrongfully arrest and imprison him for over 30 years.

Joaquin Ciria wants a July 2024 trial in his case challenging the city for charging him with a killing he didn’t commit in 1990. In court Thursday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Kandis Westmore seemed to agree summary judgment for the city is unwarranted.

“This is the thinnest information for (evidence) of someone committing murder that I think I’ve ever seen," Westmore said of Ciria’s original conviction.

Ciria spent much of his life behind bars after being charged with first-degree murder in 1990 at the age of 29. He was officially exonerated in the shooting death of his friend Felix Bastarrica in 2022 at age 61, after 32 years in prison.

He accused the city in 2022 of conspiracy and false imprisonment, among other claims, saying that officials deprived him of his civil rights by fabricating evidence “despite obvious evidence of his innocence.”

Westmore observed Thursday that the city submitted an extremely long record of exhibits. San Francisco’s chief of special litigation, Peter Keith, explained that the records cover all of the plaintiff’s claims, including that police relied on shaky testimonies to identify Ciria in the 1990 incident.

Keith described a complicated timeline of how investigators connected Ciria to the 1990 shooting, amid confusion about testimonies from eyewitnesses giving different descriptions of the shooter’s clothing and ethnicity. He said a crucial witness quoted in case exhibits told investigators that another witness told him that Ciria shot Bastarrica — a second-hand claim investigators relied on.

Westmore said that she is still trying to understand the city’s claim that “ample evidence” showed investigators had probable cause to charge Ciria.

“It’s not clear which parts of this really establish probable cause,” she said.

Keith cited a Ninth Circuit ruling that probable cause to arrest a person can come from an identification, a physical description and a connection to a vehicle used in a murder.

Attorney George Harris, representing Ciria, disputed whether officers had enough of the facts on file when they arrested Ciria. Few documents support the reasons for an arrest, other than a search warrant affidavit and statements from a key witness, he said.

Harris said that with both sides disputing what information police officers actually had in 1990, the case should head to a jury.

“There’s so many factual issues,” Harris said. “Reliance on fabricated evidence negates probable cause.”

In rebuttal, Keith said the legal standard for probable cause says, “It only matters what facts they had at the time they got the warrant.”

The judge asked Keith: “Do I need to determine whether it’s fabricated, or is that a question for the jury?”

She read aloud the legal standard that in such cases, summary judgment is only appropriate for a judge to handle when “No reasonable jury could find an absence of probable cause under the facts.”

“This case is really thin. And I assign warrants all day,” Westmore said.

The judge added that it’s a major problem that the city has lost the affidavit showing Ciria’s arrest warrant.

“It sounds like this really comes down to the information the officers had at the time, even though we don’t know what they used at the time in support of the arrest warrant,” Westmore said. “Without the affidavit, we have to go back and construct probable cause retroactively.”

The judge did not indicate when she may rule.

Ciria’s family also filed claims in June 2023, saying they want the city to pay for his wrongful detention. His son Pedro and former partner Yojana Paiz say his conviction resulted from the city and police department’s “unconstitutional investigative policies” and a failure to train or intervene or to implement remedial measures to address “tainted, reckless and unconstitutional investigation and interrogation techniques.”

The Northern California Innocence Project and The Innocence Commission — a volunteer team of legal and medical experts — successfully cleared Ciria’s name in 2020, saying police relied on rumors and coerced another man who drove the actual shooter to falsely name Ciria.

According to Ciria, at least five Black men were falsely convicted of murders that occurred between 1990 and 1991 in San Francisco based on fabricated evidence, unconstitutionally influenced witness identification or improperly incentivized evidence from San Francisco Police Department officers and inspectors.

He says it was a pattern of tactics the city used during the 1980s and 1990s, to craft unreliable suspect identifications — including by suggesting that witnesses make less-than-certain identifications, selectively recording portions of interviews, falsely documenting witness identifications and priming witnesses to identify specific suspects.

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