Ex parte Pinkard
| Decision Date | 27 May 2022 |
| Docket Number | 1200658 |
| Parties | Ex parte Greg Pinkard v. Allstate Property & Casualty Insurance Company et al. In re: Ronnie Taylor |
| Court | Alabama Supreme Court |
Ex parte Greg Pinkard
In re: Ronnie Taylor
v.
Allstate Property & Casualty Insurance Company et al.
No. 1200658
Supreme Court of Alabama
May 27, 2022
(Marion Circuit Court: CV-18-900089)
PETITION FOR WRIT OF MANDAMUS
MITCHELL, JUSTICE.
One summer afternoon, Ronnie Taylor returned from an out-of-town trip to find his cabin burned to the ground. State Deputy Fire Marshal Greg Pinkard suspected that Taylor had started the fire himself in a scheme to collect insurance money. Pinkard conveyed this suspicion to Taylor's insurance companies and to local prosecutors, who charged Taylor with arson and tampering with evidence. In his report to prosecutors, Pinkard indicated that Taylor had "admitted" to maintaining the fire and destroying evidence.
Once the transcript of Pinkard's conversation with Taylor surfaced, however, it became clear that Taylor had not actually confessed responsibility for the fire. Prosecutors dropped the charges against him, and Taylor responded by filing this lawsuit, claiming among other things that Pinkard maliciously prosecuted and defamed him. Pinkard argued below that Taylor's claims against him are barred by the doctrines of State immunity and State-agent immunity. The trial court rejected Pinkard's arguments and ruled that Taylor's claims should be heard by a jury. Pinkard then filed a petition for a writ of mandamus in this Court, asking us to overturn the trial court's ruling. We deny his petition because the trial court was correct to hold that (1) Taylor's claims against
Pinkard are not barred by State immunity and (2) Pinkard's eligibility for State-agent immunity involves disputed factual questions. In holding that Taylor's claims are not barred by State immunity, we overrule an erroneous aspect of our recent decision in Barnhart v. Ingalls, 275 So.3d 1112 (Ala. 2018), and its progeny, which incorrectly held that State immunity can block suits against individual State employees that seek damages only from a State employee's personal assets.
Facts and Procedural History[1]
When Taylor drove up to his property in rural Marion County on July 31, 2016, he saw a pile of ash where his cabin once stood. Taylor and his wife had used the cabin at various times as a rental property, a secondary home, and, most recently, a workshop. It housed several thousand dollars' worth of Taylor's mechanical equipment as well as his 1996 Lincoln Town Car. By the time Taylor arrived, it was too late to
save the car, the cabin, or anything inside it -- all that remained was the cabin's charred foundation and heaps of burnt rubble.
Taylor, who had served as a volunteer firefighter for several years, called the Haleyville Fire Department to ask his colleague, Phillip Pratt, whether the department had received a call reporting the fire. Pratt told Taylor that he had not received any reports relating to Taylor's property and asked if Taylor would like a fire truck dispatched. Taylor explained that the fire had completely consumed the cabin and that there was nothing left. He asked Pratt to at least come out to draft a report, but Pratt responded that incident reports were outside his jurisdiction and advised Taylor to contact the Marion County authorities instead.
Taylor did as Pratt suggested, contacting the Haleyville dispatch and the Marion County Sheriff's Office to request that a deputy come to the scene. Later that afternoon, the deputy arrived and examined the remains of the cabin, which he described as a pile of "cold" ash, drafted a report, and left.
Taylor then reported the fire to the bank that held the mortgage on the cabin and filed an insurance claim with the company that insured his Town Car. Together, the cabin and the car were insured for about
$40, 000. Due to an internal mistake, the bank did not report the loss to the home-insurance company until a month after the fire. Once the bank finally did report the loss, the insurance company sent an adjuster to inspect the scene of the fire.
When the adjuster arrived at the property on September 4, 2016, he noticed that a "burn barrel" (a 55-gallon steel barrel containing burnt trash) was sitting atop the cabin's ashes. The adjuster thought that the barrel was suspicious, so he asked the State Fire Marshal's Office to investigate the fire's origins. In his communications with the Fire Marshal's Office, the adjuster stated (incorrectly) that Taylor never reported the fire to the local fire department.
The Fire Marshal agreed to look into the matter and in mid-September assigned Deputy Pinkard to the case. Pinkard began his investigation by interviewing Taylor on September 16. The interview, which started off cordially, quickly escalated after Pinkard asked Taylor when the fire started. Taylor suggested that the fire must have started not too long before he arrived at the scene, because he had stopped by the cabin the day before and had not noticed anything amiss during that visit. Pinkard insisted that it was impossible for a structure as large as
the cabin to burn to ashes and then go cold in only a single day. He exclaimed that Taylor's version of events could not possibly be true and began accusing Taylor of deliberately "maintaining" or accelerating the fire. Taylor protested, but Pinkard interrupted him and demanded to know why Taylor never reported the fire to the fire department or the police.
When Taylor explained that he had, in fact, reported the fire to both the fire department and law enforcement -- and that he had the phone records to prove it -- Pinkard accused Taylor of calling authorities merely to get a report to collect insurance money. Pinkard admonished Taylor for not dispatching a fire truck to put out "whatever was still left" of the fire, telling Taylor that this failure means "you're guilty of arson." Taylor reiterated that "there was nothing left" to put out and explained that Pratt told him there was nothing the fire department could do. Pinkard again cut Taylor off, insisting, "That's not up to you [to decide] whether or not the fire's out enough. There is evidence in that fire that you let burn up ... and you knew better [because] you're a volunteer firefighter." The interview continued along these lines for some time, with Taylor
maintaining his innocence and Pinkard insisting that Taylor deliberately "let [the house] burn" in order to get his "mortgage … paid off."
Eventually, Pinkard asked Taylor about the burn barrel that the insurance adjuster had noticed sitting on top of the rubble. Taylor explained that he had placed the barrel there recently, just "the other day," because he wanted to use the barrel to clean up the ash and debris. Pinkard responded by insinuating that Taylor had added the barrel to the fire as it was still burning to accelerate the flames. Taylor denied this accusation, explaining that he had not added the barrel until after the fire had died out.
Taylor also rebuffed Pinkard's suggestion that he had started the fire to collect insurance money. Taylor admitted that he had frequently fallen behind on mortgage payments for his primary home, but he said that he had never fallen behind on mortgage payments for the cabin. Taylor told Pinkard that the fire was a financial setback to his family, despite the insurance payments, because he had stored several thousand dollars' worth of mechanical equipment in the cabin, none of which was insured and all of which was destroyed by the flames.
By the end of the interview, Pinkard's tone had softened. Pinkard intimated that he believed that Taylor might be telling the truth and stated that, in his view, "the only thing you [Taylor] did wrong was ... that you should have called somebody to make sure that the fire was completely put out."
But Pinkard's report to the district attorney's office struck a different note. In that report, Pinkard wrote that the barrel contained "several fuel items" and stated that Taylor "admit[ted] that he threw the barrel into the house after the structure had caught fire" and "before any investigator from the Fire Marshal's Office or Insurance Company was able to investigate the scene." Pinkard concluded his report by writing that "it is DSFM Pinkard['s] opinion that Ronnie Taylor maintained the structure/vehicle fire by not only refusing the service of Haleyville Fire Department, after contacting them, but also admitted to adding the barrel onto the structure with extra fuel items to burn maintaining the fire and destroying evidence."
After reading Pinkard's report, the assistant district attorney decided to pursue criminal charges against Taylor. She drafted an indictment based on Pinkard's report, charging that Taylor "intentionally
... start[ed] or maintain[ed] a fire," "refus[ed] the service of the fire department," and "add[ed] a barrel of fuel items onto the burning structure, masking the fire cause or origin." Pinkard reiterated the conclusions in his report during his testimony before the grand jury, [2]which voted to indict Taylor for second-degree arson under § 13A-7-42, Ala. Code 1975, and for tampering with evidence under § 13A-10-129, Ala. Code 1975.
Pinkard also explained his suspicions about Taylor's guilt to the insurance companies and to the Haleyville Fire Department. He encouraged Taylor's insurers to withhold financial reimbursements and requested that the Haleyville Fire Department suspend Taylor from his volunteer position.
In the aftermath of Pinkard's statements and testimony, Taylor's life began to unravel. The Haleyville Fire Department suspended him from his volunteer position. The company that insured Taylor's cabin
sued him for over $36, 000 and urged the bank to withhold payments from Taylor until after the criminal proceedings concluded. On top of these financial consequences, local news outlets reported that Taylor had been charged with arson, and those reports undermined...
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