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Ninth Circuit—Man Wrongly Jailed Based on False Identity Failed to Raise Triable Issues
Majority Says Plaintiff’s Claims Failed Because Deputies, Clerk Not Required to Investigate Where Descriptions of Suspect Reasonably Matched Plaintiff; Drawing Partial Dissent
By a MetNews Staff Writer
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held yesterday that summary judgment was properly granted to law enforcement employees who failed to conduct further investigation in booking a man on charges meant for someone else, finding that the plaintiff, who had in his possession the identification card of the true suspect, bore enough physical similarities to the warrant subject as to defeat his Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment claims.
In a memorandum opinion, signed by Senior Circuit Judge A. Wallace Tashima and Circuit Judge Jacqueline H. Nguyen, the court found that the realities that the true suspect was 5 inches taller and 25 pounds heavier than the plaintiff were not enough to undermine probable cause and create a triable Fourth Amendment issue, and held that the law enforcement employees had no obligation, under due process, to investigate his claims of mistaken identity.
Circuit Judge Salvador Mendoza Jr. concurred with the majority as to the Fourth Amendment claims but disagreed that a civilian booking clerk was not obligated to further investigate his identity under the circumstances presented.
Plaintiff Charles Hayes sued employees of the Kern County Sheriff’s Office, under 42 U.S.C. §1983, after he was arrested in Texas, on Nov. 3, 2018, holding the identification card belonging to Devon Robinson. Both men are Black.
Robinson’s identification indicates that he is 5 feet, 11 inches tall and weighs 185 pounds, while Hayes is five inches shorter and weighed only 160 pounds at the time of his arrest. Hayes claims he found the card on the ground before he encountered officers.
Hayes was booked in Clark County under Robinson’s name on resisting arrest charges, even though he claims he told employees his true name. After a fingerprint check revealed that he had previously been arrested under his true name, a supervisor completed a “Corrected Booking Voucher” to identify him as Hayes with Robinson listed as an alias.
Texas authorities discovered that Robinson had an arrest warrant out of California for rape and kidnapping. At an extradition hearing, Hayes unsuccessfully asserted that he was misidentified; on Dec. 27, Kern County Deputies Christopher Banks and Patrick Klawitter arrived to transport him to California.
Once he arrived in Kern County, Hayes says that he continued to protest that he had been wrongly arrested, but alleges that officers made jokes, saying things like “all Black people look alike” and holding a photograph of Robinson near his face. On Jan. 14, 2019, he was released after the victim of Robinson’s crime said he was not the perpetrator during a preliminary hearing.
Hayes claims that he found Robinson’s identification on the ground before his arrest.
He sued the county and the employees involved with his transport and booking—including Banks, Klawitter, Mario Rojas, the investigating officer on the rape case, and Brandy Hirrel, the civilian booking clerk at the station—asserting claims for false arrest and false imprisonment under the Fourth Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Summary Judgment
Magistrate Judge Christopher Dale Baker of the Eastern District of California granted the defendants’ motion for summary judgment, saying:
“The Court finds no reasonable jury could find the arresting officers here were unreasonable in believing that Plaintiff was the subject of the warrant.”
He noted case law establishing that, under some circumstances, law enforcement officers must conduct further investigation to ensure that a party had not been wrongly arrested but said that these cases generally involve significant physical differences between the complaining party and the true suspect.
In the present case, he opined that “[e]ven if Plaintiff complained…of his mistaken identity, the 5-inch height and 25-pound weight differences were too minor to warrant further investigation.”
Ninth Circuit’s View
The jurists agreed with Baker that the physical differences were not so great as to undermine probable cause, writing:
“The district court properly granted summary judgment on Hayes’ Fourth Amendment claims because he failed to raise a triable dispute as to whether Deputies Banks and Klawitter lacked probable cause to arrest him….Hayes did not show that the physical differences between himself and the suspect described in the warrant undermined probable cause….Nor did he show that his assertions of mistaken identity undermined probable cause….He possessed an identification card that matched the name, birth date, weight, and race of the person named in a warrant that was upheld and uncontested in two subsequent judicial hearings.”
As to the plaintiff’s due process claims, Tashima and Nguyen said, in a footnote:
“Hirrel was not a sworn peace officer, but was instead a Sheriff Support Technician or booking clerk. Her role was limited to receiving persons presented by arresting or sworn officers. Hayes does not identify any policy she violated in this capacity. Further, ‘aliases and false identification are not uncommon[’] during booking….Hirrel processed Hayes’ fingerprints and notated his true name as an alias on file, both of which were already linked to an existing electronic custody file. Under these circumstances, no reasonable juror would find that Hirrel had a duty to further investigate Hayes’ identity.”
Under these circumstances, they concluded:
“The district court properly granted summary judgment on Hayes’ Fourteenth Amendment due process claims because he failed to raise a triable dispute as to whether Deputies Banks, Klawitter, and Rojas and booking clerk Hirrel failed adequately to investigate his identity.”
Declaring that “he failed to establish the requirements of municipal liability,” the judges also found that Baker properly granted summary judgment on Hayes’ claims against the county.
Mendoza’s View
Mendoza remarked:
“A mistaken incarceration may violate the Due Process Clause where ‘the circumstances indicated to the defendants that further investigation was warranted[.]’ ”
In Hayes’ case, he opined:
“[A] reasonable jury may readily conclude that the circumstances presented to Defendant Hirrel would have required further investigation. I would read the facts and inferences in Hayes’s favor including the following: he differed significantly in height and weight from the warrant, he made repeated protests of mistaken identity, he had two oddly distinct aliases. A fairly light effort on the part of Defendant Hirrel would have confirmed his mistaken identity.”
Based on these factors, he commented that “I dissent as to Hayes’s Fourteenth Amendment claim under Section 1983 against Defendant Hirrel.”
The case is Hayes v. County of Kern, 24-193.
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