Richards v. Cnty. of San Bernardino
| Decision Date | 24 June 2022 |
| Docket Number | 19-56205 |
| Parties | William J. Richards, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. County of San Bernardino; Mark Nourse; Norman Parent; Tom Bradford; John Navarro; Daniel Gregonis; Norman Sperber; Does, 1 through 20, inclusive, Defendants-Appellees, and San Bernardino County District Attorney Office; San Bernardino County Sheriffs Office; Ramos Michael; Michael Risley; Craig Ogino, Defendants. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit |
Argued and Submitted February 7, 2022 Pasadena, California
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Central District of California, D.C. No. 5:17-cv-00497- SJO-SP S James Otero, District Judge, Presiding Caitlin S. Weisberg (argued), Marilyn E. Bednarski, David S McLane, and Ben Shaw, McLane, Bednarski &Litt LLP Pasadena, California, for Plaintiff-Appellant.
Susan E. Coleman (argued), Burke, Williams &Sorensen, LLP, Los Angeles, California, for Defendants-Appellees.
Before: Kermit V. Lipez, [*] Richard C. Tallman, and Kenneth K. Lee, Circuit Judges.
The panel reversed the district court's summary judgment for the County of San Bernardino and County investigator Daniel Gregonis in an action brought pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 alleging defendants violated plaintiff's constitutional rights during his murder investigation and prosecution, resulting in his erroneous conviction for the murder of his wife, Pamela Richards.
Plaintiff alleged that Gregonis fabricated evidence against him by planting, on Pamela's body, blue fibers from a shirt that plaintiff was wearing on the night of the murder. Plaintiff further alleged claims for municipal liability pursuant to Monell v. Dep't of Soc. Servs., 436 U.S. 658 (1978), against the County, arguing that the County's customs and policies, and the absence of better customs and policies, resulted in the alleged constitutional violations.
As a preliminary matter, the panel determined that the district court incorrectly held that plaintiff was required to show that Gregonis had a motive to manipulate the evidence. Plaintiff did not need to rely on motive evidence because he supported his claim with direct evidence of fabrication.
Viewing the facts in the light most favorable to the nonmoving party, plaintiff raised a triable issue as to whether Gregonis deliberately planted the blue fibers under Pamela's fingernail. A jury could reasonably draw the inference that the blue fibers were not under Pamela's fingernail at the time of the autopsy and were planted on Pamela's body later after the autopsy was performed. Because Gregonis was the only person who accessed plaintiff's shirt and Pamela's severed fingers before the fibers were discovered, a reasonable jury could conclude that Gregonis was the person who planted the blue fibers. The panel further held that the very same rationale motivating the materiality causation standard for claims brought under Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963), is also present in § 1983 claims for deliberate fabrication of evidence, which implicate a plaintiff's fundamental right to a fair trial.
The panel held that because the district court erred by failing to find potential civil rights liability as to Gregonis, its derivative ruling as to potential County liability under Monell should also be reversed. The panel further held that the district court erred by not addressing whether plaintiff could show that he suffered a constitutional injury by the County unrelated to the individual officers' liability under § 1983. Plaintiff put forth at least two Monell claims that were not premised on a theory of liability that first required a finding of liability on the part of the individual officers: (1) that the County's policy of prohibiting coroner investigators from entering a crime scene until cleared by homicide detectives resulted in the loss of exculpatory time-of-death evidence, and (2) that the lack of any training or policy on Brady by the Sheriff's Department resulted in critical exculpatory evidence being withheld by the prosecution. The panel therefore remanded to the district court to consider these claims against Gregonis and the County in the first instance.
In a concurrently filed memorandum disposition, the panel affirmed the district court's dismissal of plaintiff's remaining claims.
In 1997, after four trials and two hung juries, PlaintiffAppellant William Richards was convicted of the first-degree murder of his wife, Pamela. In 2016, the California Supreme Court vacated Richards's conviction, finding that it was based on "false evidence" as characterized in subsequently enacted legislation defining the term, Cal. Penal Code § 1473(e)(1), and Richards has since been exonerated of Pamela's murder, see Memorandum Decision, People v. Richards, No. FVI00826 (San Bernardino Super. Ct. June 18, 2021).
Richards now brings this 42 U.S.C. § 1983 action against Defendants-Appellees-various sheriff's officers and the County of San Bernardino-alleging that Defendants violated his constitutional rights during the 1993 murder investigation and prosecution, resulting in his erroneous conviction. The district court granted summary judgment for Defendants, finding that Richards did not "carry his burden to show that the investigating officers committed any [federal] constitutional errors in their investigation of Pamela's murder." We have jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1291, and we reverse the district court's judgment regarding the claims discussed herein and remand for further proceedings solely as to them.[1]
At 11:58 p.m. on the night of August 10, 1993, the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department (SBSD) received a call that a dead body had been discovered at a remote residential location in the Mojave Desert in San Bernardino County California.[2] The victim, Pamela Richards, had been brutally beaten and suffered two fatal injuries-strangulation and blunt force trauma to the head.[3]
An SBSD deputy was first to arrive at the rural property at approximately 12:38 a.m., where he was met by Pamela's husband, William Richards. Richards told the deputy he had discovered Pamela's body lying face-down on the ground outside their home shortly after he returned from work. According to Richards, Pamela was "stone cold" and likely had been dead for hours.
The deputy conducted a visual and physical inspection of Pamela's body. Pamela's head had been crushed and there was a large pool of blood beside her. There were numerous bloodstains and spatter on Pamela's body and the surrounding area, and a bloody cinder block and steppingstone were lying nearby. The deputy felt for a pulse at Pamela's neck and wrist and, after determining that Pamela was deceased, called for homicide investigators to respond.
In the early morning hours of August 11, several homicide investigators arrived at the scene. Richards argues that the investigators fabricated evidence against him and otherwise performed a recklessly biased and unreliable investigation.[4] One such investigator was Criminalist Daniel Gregonis, who was employed in the SBSD Crime Lab. As a criminalist, Gregonis worked with homicide investigators to process the crime scene, to collect physical evidence, and to package and preserve that evidence so that it could be transported to the crime lab for further analysis. Gregonis was also responsible for later examining the forensic evidence at the lab.
Richards alleges that while forensic evidence was being examined at the crime lab, Gregonis deliberately fabricated inculpatory evidence against him. Specifically, Richards claims that Gregonis planted blue fibers from a cotton work shirt that Richards was wearing on the night of the murder, fibers which Gregonis says he found under one of Pamela's fingernails.
At the autopsy, the medical examiner had scraped Pamela's fingernails in search of "any type of trace evidence, anything that might be adhered to the nails," and then the examiner severed two of Pamela's fingers for further processing. On September 13, 1993, Gregonis checked out of evidence Pamela's two severed fingers for further examination. On September 14, Gregonis checked out Richards's clothing, including the blue cotton work shirt that Richards was wearing on the night of Pamela's murder. At that point in time, aside from Gregonis, no one else had examined either Richards's clothing or the severed fingers since the time they were first logged into evidence at SBSD's secure property section.
Gregonis claimed that, on September 13, he found a tuft of blue cotton fibers wedged in a crack of a broken fingernail on one of the severed fingers. Gregonis videorecorded his removal of the blue fibers on September 14-the same date that he had custody of both the severed fingers and Richards's clothing. The tuft of fibers was 1/2 centimeter long and contained 15 individual fibers, grouped together. Gregonis subsequently compared the blue fibers to a sample from Richards's shirt and concluded that "[t]he fibers recovered from the broken fingernail . . . from [Pamela] are consistent with originating from the light blue shirt . . . from [Richards]."[5]
The blue fibers were visible to the naked eye, yet they had not been observed by any other investigator prior to Gregonis's discovery. The blue fibers were not located during the autopsy, nor were they detected by the medical examiner during the finger-scraping, fingerprinting, or finger-severing process in which the examiner was in close contact with Pamela's hands. Moreover, the fibers are clearly visible in photographs taken from Gregonis's removal video, but are noticeably absent from photographs taken of Pamela's hands during the prior autopsy.
On September 3, 1993, Richards was...
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