California Supreme Court repeals decades of rulings shielding police from lawsuits

The state Supreme Court on Thursday broadened Californians’ right to seek damages for abusive conduct by police, overturning decades of rulings that shielded police and the agencies that employed them from liability for any actions officers took during investigations.

State law does not provide “a sweeping immunity for any and all acts police officers may perform within the scope of their employment,” Justice Leondra Kruger said in the 7-0 ruling.

The court reinstated a lawsuit by a woman whose husband’s body, after he had been fatally shot by a gunman, was left naked near the couple’s home for eight hours by Riverside County deputies who were searching for the shooter. Lower courts had dismissed Dora Leon’s suit because the officers were investigating a crime, though there was no prosecution because the gunman killed himself.

The justices also rejected the reasoning of 12 state appeals court rulings since 1982 that had interpreted a California law to bar damage claims against officers and their government employers for police conduct during actual or potential criminal investigations.

The leading case, also from Riverside County, was titled Amylou R., the name of a 15-year-old girl who had been raped by a man who raped and killed her friend. Officers said she was not cooperating adequately in the investigation and began telling her friends and family that she was lying and had actually taken part in the killing.

She sued and won $325,000 in damages, but an appeals court overturned the verdict and dismissed the suit in 1994 because the officers had been conducting an investigation. Those damages will not be reinstated now because the case is over, but the appellate ruling will no longer be a binding precedent for lower courts.

”No matter how wrongful or malicious their conduct was, it was impossible to sue,” said Richard Antognini, a lawyer for Dora Leon. He said he did not know why the state’s high court had not taken up the issue earlier, but that if the court had endorsed the appellate rulings, “it would have undermined all the civil rights statutes the California Legislature passed over decades.”

“There’s no more investigative immunity,” said attorney Leslie Zador, who filed arguments urging the court to overrule the Amylou R. decision and reinstate Leon’s case and others. Zador represents the parents of a youth fatally run over by a Highway Patrol officer who, the lawyer said, was speeding down a freeway without activating his warning lights or siren. A court dismissed the parents’ suit last year because the officer was conducting an investigation.

A lawyer for Riverside County could not be reached for comment.

The cases involve a 1963 state law that shields government employees in California from damages for any harm caused by “instituting or prosecuting any judicial or administrative proceeding,” even if an employee acted “maliciously and without probable cause.”

Though state courts have issued varying interpretations of the law, most rulings in recent decades have relied on the Amylou R. decision to reject damage claims against police and their employees as well as prosecutors. But the court said Thursday that the law was intended only to protect those involved in prosecutions, including allegedly “malicious prosecutions,” and not to shield police.

Extending immunity to officers investigating potential criminal charges “ignores the simple reality that investigations need not, and often do not, lead to the institution or prosecution of any proceedings — a fact that ought to serve as a tipoff that the two things are not the same,” Kruger wrote.

She said the deputies who left José Leon’s body unclothed for eight hours after his shooting were engaged in “the investigation of a potential crime, unconnected to the filing of any charges,” and were not shielded from his wife’s lawsuit.

The case is Leon v. County of Riverside, S269672.