Wrongly jailed man's suit against Riverside County prosecutors tossed

(CN) — A developmentally delayed man who spent more than three years in jail while awaiting trial for a murder he didn’t commit lost his bid to sue Riverside County and three former prosecutors on Friday, after a federal judge ruled the prosecutors are entitled to “absolute immunity.”

Roger Wayne Parker — who says he has an IQ of between 75 and 79, well below the average of 100 — was arrested in 2010 for the murder of Brandon Stevenson. Stevenson’s body had been found in the Desert Hot Springs home where Parker lived, along with Parker’s roommate, Willie Womack. According to the lawsuit Parker would later file, police detained and questioned Parker for over 15 hours — “all the time encouraging him to admit that he had killed Stevenson in self-defense”

Parker said in his complaint that he had “denied killing Stevenson for several hours before ultimately confessing ‘very sarcastically’ because the detectives had told him [that] self-defense was legal and denial only landed him in jail.”

The first prosecutor, according to the suit, “immediately recognized that Parker’s confession was a sham because it was both coerced and completely inconsistent with the physical evidence,” but was removed from the case. The second prosecutor was dubious, too, writing in a memo to his boss, “We can’t prove the case… I’m not going to say he’s innocent. That’s not my job. My job is to tell you whether or not I can prove at least beyond a reasonable doubt or [if we] even [have] probable cause to believe he committed the crime. I don’t think we have either.”

It wasn’t until 2014 that the charges against Parker were dropped — six months after prosecutors obtained jailhouse recordings in which Womack was heard confessing to the murder.

“For almost four years, the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office prosecuted Roger Wayne Parker for a murder that the district attorney knew Parker did not commit,” Parker said in his complaint, first filed in 2021. “Unfortunately, this behavior is not an outlier for the Riverside County DA’s Office, which has a decades-old practice of withholding exculpatory evidence and refusing to dismiss cases against innocent defendants.”

The complaint initially included four causes of action, including a violation of the Fifth Amendment and malicious prosecution, a claim which was thrown out by a federal judge a year later. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals weighed in a year after that and said all the claims should have been thrown out, although it allowed the complaint to be refiled with a different due process claim. Again, the court trimmed two of the four causes of action.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Jesus Bernal dismissed the rest the complaint, this time without leave to amend, according to theminute order. Bernal acknowledged that “the allegations of withheld evidence and plaintiff’s lengthy, and unjustified, detention are repugnant,” but found prosecutors were still entitled to immunity because they were acting on behalf of the state. He cited a 1989 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which found that “the 11th Amendment dictates that the state, its agencies, and its officials acting in their official capacity cannot be sued for money damages.”

Neither party responded to emails requesting a comment on the ruling.

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