Donald Wige v. City of Los Angeles , 713 F.3d 1183 ( 2013 )


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  •                 FOR PUBLICATION
    UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
    FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT
    DONALD WIGE ,                            No. 10-56515
    Plaintiff-Appellant,
    D.C. No.
    v.                      2:09-cv-01369-
    MMM-PLA
    CITY OF LOS ANGELES; OFFICER
    RYAN BELLOWS; LEONARD
    MCKENSIE ; OFFICER JASON LEIKAM ,         OPINION
    Defendants-Appellees.
    Appeal from the United States District Court
    for the Central District of California
    Margaret M. Morrow, District Judge, Presiding
    Argued and Submitted
    September 6, 2012—Pasadena, California
    Filed April 16, 2013
    Before: Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge, Paul J. Watford
    and Andrew D. Hurwitz, Circuit Judges.
    Opinion by Judge Watford
    2                WIGE V . CITY OF LOS ANGELES
    SUMMARY*
    Civil Rights
    Reversing the district court’s summary judgment and
    remanding, the panel held that issue preclusion did not bar a
    plaintiff from bringing a 42 U.S.C. § 1983 action for false
    arrest, false imprisonment, and malicious prosecution.
    The panel held that even though at a state court
    preliminary hearing, a magistrate had found probable cause
    to believe that plaintiff committed attempted murder, plaintiff
    raised a genuine dispute in his § 1983 action as to whether the
    lead detective on the case fabricated evidence by falsely
    testifying at the hearing that the victim had identified plaintiff
    as the shooter. The panel held that the identity-of-issues
    requirement for issue preclusion was not met because the
    evidence available and known to the detective was different
    from the evidence presented to the court at the preliminary
    hearing. At the preliminary hearing, the state court
    determined only that a reasonable person could have believed
    the detective. It did not (and did not have to) decide whether
    the detective should be believed. Because that was the issue
    that plaintiff sought to litigate in his § 1983 action, he was not
    barred by the doctrine of issue preclusion from doing so.
    *
    This summary constitutes no part of the opinion of the court. It has
    been prepared by court staff for the convenience of the reader.
    WIGE V . CITY OF LOS ANGELES                  3
    COUNSEL
    James S. Muller (argued), Law Offices of James Muller, and
    Chris Ford, Law Office of Chris Ford, Los Angeles,
    California, for Plaintiff-Appellant.
    Amy Jo Field (argued), Deputy City Attorney, and Carmen A.
    Trutanich, City Attorney, Los Angeles, California, for
    Defendants-Appellees.
    OPINION
    WATFORD, Circuit Judge:
    The State of California charged the plaintiff in this case,
    Donald Wige, with attempted murder. A jury eventually
    acquitted Wige, but not before he spent ten months in jail
    awaiting trial. In this action, brought under 42 U.S.C. § 1983,
    Wige sues several police officers and their employer, the City
    of Los Angeles, for false arrest, false imprisonment, and
    malicious prosecution.
    The question before us is whether Wige’s action is barred
    by the doctrine of issue preclusion. At Wige’s preliminary
    hearing in state court, the magistrate judge found probable
    cause to believe Wige had committed attempted murder. If
    that finding is entitled to preclusive effect, Wige’s § 1983
    claims are barred because each claim requires him to prove
    that defendants lacked probable cause to arrest and prosecute
    him for that offense. See Awabdy v. City of Adelanto,
    
    368 F.3d 1062
    , 1066 (9th Cir. 2004); Cabrera v. City of
    Huntington Park, 
    159 F.3d 374
    , 380 (9th Cir. 1998) (per
    curiam).
    4              WIGE V . CITY OF LOS ANGELES
    We begin then with the events at Wige’s preliminary
    hearing. No one disputed that the victim of the charged
    offense, Carlos Torres, had been shot and struck in the leg by
    an assailant firing from a moving car. The only issue was
    whether probable cause existed to believe Wige was the
    shooter. The State presented no physical evidence tying
    Wige to the shooting. But the lead detective on the case,
    Officer Ryan Bellows, testified that he and his partner
    interviewed Torres shortly after the shooting; that he showed
    Torres a photographic lineup which included Wige; and that
    Torres circled Wige’s photograph to identify him as the
    shooter.
    Torres, however, told a different story. He testified that
    he had never seen Wige before and that when the officers
    showed him the photographic lineup, he told them the shooter
    was not among those included. Torres further testified that he
    circled Wige’s photograph and wrote a statement purporting
    to identify Wige as the shooter only because the officers
    pressured him into doing so after several hours of
    interrogation. Officer Bellows denied having exerted any
    pressure on Torres and suggested that Torres’s newfound
    reluctance to finger Wige was the product of a recent death
    threat from one of Wige’s fellow gang members.
    At the conclusion of the preliminary hearing, Wige
    moved to dismiss the attempted murder charge for lack of
    probable cause. The state court rejected Wige’s arguments
    and bound him over for trial, offering the following
    explanation: “There are issues in the case. I think most of
    the issues you addressed are really for the jury to decide; not
    the Court at the preliminary hearing.” A jury subsequently
    acquitted Wige of the attempted murder charge after hearing
    testimony from Officer Bellows and from Torres, whose trial
    WIGE V . CITY OF LOS ANGELES                    5
    testimony largely tracked what he said at the preliminary
    hearing.
    Now back to this action. The district court granted
    summary judgment for defendants on the ground that the state
    court’s probable cause finding is entitled to preclusive effect
    and bars Wige from relitigating the issue of probable cause.
    The court accepted defendants’ argument that, by finding
    probable cause in the face of Officer Bellows’s and Torres’s
    conflicting testimony, the state court necessarily found
    Officer Bellows credible and Torres not credible. Neither the
    district court nor defendants ever identified where in the
    preliminary hearing record the state court purported to make
    this credibility determination.
    To assess whether the district court’s preclusion ruling is
    correct, we look to state law. Federal courts must give
    “preclusive effect to state-court judgments whenever the
    courts of the State from which the judgments emerged would
    do so.” Allen v. McCurry, 
    449 U.S. 90
    , 96 (1980); see
    28 U.S.C. § 1738. In California, issue preclusion applies
    when five requirements are met: (1) the issue sought to be
    relitigated must be identical to the issue decided in the earlier
    action; (2) the issue must have been actually litigated and
    (3) necessarily decided in the earlier action; (4) the earlier
    decision must be final and made on the merits; and (5) the
    party against whom issue preclusion is asserted must have
    been a party to the earlier action or in privity with such a
    party. Lucido v. Superior Court, 
    795 P.2d 1223
    , 1225 (Cal.
    1990). As a general rule, each of these requirements will be
    met when courts are asked to give preclusive effect to
    preliminary hearing probable cause findings in subsequent
    civil actions for false arrest and malicious prosecution.
    6                WIGE V . CITY OF LOS ANGELES
    McCutchen v. City of Montclair, 
    87 Cal. Rptr. 2d 95
    , 99–101
    (Ct. App. 1999).1
    In particular, the identity-of-issues requirement will
    generally be satisfied because in most cases the issue resolved
    at the preliminary hearing is identical to the issue that must be
    resolved in a false arrest or malicious prosecution
    action—namely, whether the evidence supports a finding of
    probable cause. “The quantum of evidence required to
    support a warrantless arrest is the same as the quantum of
    evidence required to hold the defendant to stand trial.” Id. at
    100. The test in both instances is whether the available
    evidence would lead a reasonable person to harbor a strong
    suspicion of the accused’s guilt. See People v. Campa,
    
    686 P.2d 634
    , 638 (Cal. 1984) (arrest); People v. Uhlemann,
    
    511 P.2d 609
    , 612 (Cal. 1973) (preliminary hearing). Thus,
    so long as the evidence known to the arresting officers is not
    materially different from the evidence presented at the
    preliminary hearing, “a finding of sufficiency of the evidence
    to require the defendant to stand trial is a finding of probable
    cause to arrest the defendant.” McCutchen, 87 Cal. Rptr. 2d
    at 100; see Haupt v. Dillard, 
    17 F.3d 285
    , 289 (9th Cir.
    1994).
    If the evidence known to the arresting officers is
    materially different from the evidence presented at the
    preliminary hearing, however, the identity-of-issues
    1
    In so holding, McCutchen relied on our decision in Haupt v. Dillard,
    
    17 F.3d 285
    , 289 (9th Cir. 1994), which construed Nevada law to the same
    effect. A more recent California Court of Appeal decision, Schmidlin v.
    City of Palo Alto, 
    69 Cal. Rptr. 3d 365
    , 395–96 (Ct. App. 2008), has
    questioned the soundness of McCutchen. Given our resolution of this
    case, we need not resolve any conflict between McCutchen and Schmidlin.
    WIGE V . CITY OF LOS ANGELES                            7
    requirement will not be met. That fact is reflected in two
    exceptions California courts have recognized to the general
    rule according preclusive effect to probable cause findings.
    First, issue preclusion does not apply in false arrest actions
    when additional evidence not available to the officers at the
    time of arrest is presented at the preliminary hearing.
    McCutchen, 87 Cal. Rptr. 2d at 100. A magistrate judge’s
    finding of probable cause based on the testimony of two
    witnesses, for example, obviously does not resolve whether
    the officers had probable cause to arrest if only one witness
    was available and known to them at the time of arrest. See id.
    at 101; Haupt, 17 F.3d at 289.2
    Second, issue preclusion should be denied “where the
    plaintiff alleges that the arresting officer lied or fabricated
    evidence presented at the preliminary hearing.” McCutchen,
    87 Cal. Rptr. 2d at 101; see also Awabdy, 368 F.3d at 1068.
    In that circumstance, too, the identity-of-issues requirement
    will not be met because the evidence available and known to
    the arresting officers is different from the evidence presented
    to the court. That the court found probable cause based on
    the set of facts presented at the preliminary hearing obviously
    does not resolve whether the officers had probable cause
    based on the true set of facts known to them. McCutchen’s
    fabricated evidence exception allows plaintiffs who can
    establish that an officer lied or fabricated evidence to
    relitigate the issue of probable cause with the falsified
    evidence removed from the equation or, in cases involving
    2
    W ige’s case does not fall within this exception. The evidence available
    at the time of W ige’s arrest was no different from the evidence presented
    at his preliminary hearing. At both junctures, the State grounded probable
    cause almost entirely on Torres’s purported identification of W ige as the
    shooter.
    8              WIGE V . CITY OF LOS ANGELES
    intentional concealment of exculpatory evidence, with the
    undisclosed evidence added back into the equation. See
    Morley v. Walker, 
    175 F.3d 756
    , 760 (9th Cir. 1999) (similar
    analysis in qualified immunity context).
    In our view, Wige’s case potentially falls within this latter
    exception, and the district court therefore erred in granting
    summary judgment to defendants on issue preclusion
    grounds. Wige has raised a “genuine dispute,” Fed. R. Civ.
    P. 56(a), as to whether Officer Bellows fabricated evidence
    at the preliminary hearing by falsely testifying that Torres had
    identified Wige as the shooter. Wige does not rely on mere
    speculation that Officer Bellows fabricated evidence; he
    relies on testimony under oath from Torres himself that the
    officers pressured him into making a false identification.
    That alleged fabrication plainly meets the materiality
    threshold for defeating summary judgment on the merits: All
    agree that a valid identification by Torres would support a
    finding of probable cause, but that without his identification
    probable cause would be absent.
    Whether Officer Bellows fabricated evidence at the
    preliminary hearing is thus the key (and perhaps dispositive)
    factual issue to be resolved in this action. Defendants
    contend this issue was actually litigated and resolved against
    Wige at the preliminary hearing as well, such that he should
    be precluded from relitigating it here. According to
    defendants, the state court must have determined that Officer
    Bellows was telling the truth because otherwise it could not
    have found probable cause to bind Wige over for trial.
    Defendants are correct that in some circumstances a
    probable cause finding necessarily entails a rejection of
    challenges raised to the veracity of the arresting officer. See,
    WIGE V . CITY OF LOS ANGELES                    9
    e.g., Guenther v. Holmgreen, 
    738 F.2d 879
    , 884 (7th Cir.
    1984). But in this case the state court never purported to find
    either that Officer Bellows’s testimony was credible or that
    Torres’s testimony was not. After hearing Wige’s arguments
    against probable cause, the state court merely observed:
    “There are issues in the case. I think most of the issues you
    addressed are really for the jury to decide; not the Court at the
    preliminary hearing.” Having heard the conflicting evidence,
    the court did not decide whether Officer Bellows or Torres
    was telling the truth; it decided only that a reasonable jury
    could believe either one.
    That was all the state court needed to decide in order to
    find probable cause. At the preliminary hearing, a court’s
    role “is limited to determining whether a reasonable person
    could harbor a strong suspicion of the defendant’s guilt, i.e.,
    whether such a person could reasonably weigh the evidence,
    resolve conflicts, and give or withhold credence to particular
    witnesses in favor of harboring such a suspicion.” Cooley v.
    Superior Court, 
    57 P.3d 654
    , 668 (Cal. 2002) (second
    emphasis added). The state court therefore determined only
    that a reasonable person could have believed Officer Bellows.
    It did not (and did not have to) decide whether Officer
    Bellows should be believed. That is the issue Wige seeks to
    litigate in this action, and he is not barred by the doctrine of
    issue preclusion from doing so.
    REVERSED and REMANDED.