Monday, December 29, 2025
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Court of Appeal:
Ex-Public Employee Will Not Be Stripped of Pension Right
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Legislation enacted in 2012 proclaiming that a public employee partially loses pension rights by committing a felony ties to official duties does not extend to a former San Francisco deputy sheriff who was convicted in federal court of mail wire fraud by making a partially false insurance claim based on a burglary of her home, Div. One of the First District Court of Appeal held on Friday.
Justice Monique Langhorne Wilson authored the opinion which rejects the position of the California Public Employees Retirement System (“CalPERS”) that Government Code §7522 applies to ex-deputy April Myres. The statute says, in subd. (b)(1):
“If a public employee is convicted by a state or federal trial court of any felony under state or federal law for conduct arising out of or in the performance of his or her official duties…, he or she shall forfeit all accrued rights and benefits in any public retirement system in which he or she is a member to the extent provided in subdivision (c) and shall not accrue further benefits in that public retirement system, effective on the date of the conviction.”
Subd. (c)(1) says that the employee “shall forfeit all the rights and benefits earned or accrued from the earliest date of the commission of any felony described in subdivision (b) to the forfeiture date, inclusive.”
CalPERS took the position that Myers forfeited pension rights relating to the nine-and-a-half months from the date she sent a false claim to Farmers Insurance Company until her retirement. The decision was upheld by an administrative law judge and San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard B. Ulmer denied Myers’s petition for a writ of administrative mandamus.
Agrees With Myers
In her opinion reversing the judgment, Langhorne Wilson expressed agreement with Myers “that, while her criminal conduct related in some ways to her position, it did not ‘aris[e] out of or in the performance of...her official duties” as required by §7522.72(b)(1)). She added:
“We reject CalPERS’s expansive view that, to satisfy that standard, conduct need only be ‘job related.’ That view ignores the statute’s text and has no support in precedent.”
CalPERS cited the facts that Myers, while a jail guard, engaged in a clandescent romantic relationship with an inmate, Antoine Fowler; represented to Farmers that she did not have a “disgruntled ex boyfriend” who might have committed the burglary when, in fact, Fowler, upon his release would live at or stay overnight at Myers home and probably was the thief; and did not reveal Fowler’s identity or possible culpability to the FBI.
Langhorne Wilson commented that none of that was “conduct for which the jury could possibly have found Myres guilty of mail and wire fraud.”
Other Allegations
CalPERS also accused Myers of “lying as to the ownership” of certain property, including a gun, issued to her by the Sheriff’s Department and “using employer resources (the...fax machine and...cover sheet) to perpetuate her fraud.”
Those acts, the justice said, “are among those for which her jury could have found her guilty,” but added that “even assuming the jury did rely on that conduct, CalPERS fails to show it arose out of or in the performance of official duties.”
She elaborated:
“The fact that the property of which she falsely claimed ownership was issued to her for use in performing her official duties does not mean that filing the insurance claim in some way arose out of her performance of those duties—any more than if, while off duty at home, she had for personal reasons used her service weapon to shoot someone.”
As to use of the department’s fax machine, she said:
“Myres had no official duty to send Farmers the fax; it did not further or arise out of the performance of one; and neither the federal prosecutors nor CalPERS has even alleged she sent the fax while on duty.”
The case is Myers v. Board of Administration for Public Employees’ Retirement System, A170516.
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