A California woman won’t be allowed to sue the police officer who allegedly leaked a confidential abuse report to her violent boyfriend after the Supreme Court declined to review her case, ending her nearly decade-long legal battle to hold police officers responsible for abetting her abuse.
The Supreme Court declined this week to take up a petition for writ of certiorari filed in August by Desiree Martinez. Martinez filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in 2015 against several police officers in Clovis, California, who she accused of ignoring multiple attempts to report her abusive boyfriend. She says that’s because her boyfriend, Kyle Pennington, was also a Clovis police officer.
But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that those officers, including one who tipped off her boyfriend, are immune from Martinez’s lawsuit under qualified immunity—a legal doctrine that shields state and local government officials from federal civil suits if their alleged misconduct was not “clearly established” by existing case law.
Qualified immunity allows government officials to avoid liability even in cases where courts find that they violated the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights. Defenders of qualified immunity say it protects police from frivolous lawsuits, but in practice it also short-circuits credible allegations of civil rights violations before they ever reach a jury.
Martinez was represented by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm.
“This is obviously hugely disappointing,” Anya Bidwell, an Institute for Justice senior attorney, said in a press release. “Qualified immunity should not be a one-size-fits-all doctrine that protects on-the-beat cops and desk-bound bureaucrats alike. My heart breaks for Desiree. But one day, when we defeat qualified immunity, it will be because she and other heroes like her had the courage to stand up.”
According to Martinez’s Supreme Court petition, in one instance she filed a confidential abuse report against Pennington to the Clovis police. Later, during a late-night argument, Pennington called another Clovis officer, Channon High. Pennington put her on speakerphone and asked Martinez, “So you’re telling the cops what I did to you?”
Martinez denied it, but High interjected, “Yes, she did. I see a report right here.”
Martinez claims Pennington hung up the phone and sexually and physically abused her. Pennington was later convicted of violating a restraining order, and prosecutors dropped more serious charges against him in exchange for a guilty plea to a single misdemeanor domestic abuse charge.
Martinez’s 2015 lawsuit alleged High violated her substantive due process rights under the 14th Amendment by disclosing her confidential report to Pennington.
The long legal saga that followed shows how qualified immunity shuts the courthouse door on alleged victims of government abuse before their claims can ever be judged on the merits.
A U.S. district court initially ruled that High wasn’t entitled to qualified immunity from Martinez’s suit, writing that “it was clearly established that an officer sharing a domestic violence victim’s confidential information to the alleged abuser would be a violation of the victim’s substantive due process rights.”
High appealed to the 9th Circuit, which likewise concluded that “Officer High violated Ms. Martinez’s due process rights by knowingly placing her in greater danger of Mr. Pennington’s assaults.” (When considering a motion to dismiss a civil lawsuit, courts are obligated to assume the plaintiff’s factual allegations are true.)
From that sentence, a reader might assume that the 9th Circuit likewise found that High wasn’t entitled to qualified immunity—but not so!
Although the 9th Circuit previously ruled in 2006 that police officers violated due process by disclosing complaints to their subjects, it decided that the facts of that case were not sufficiently similar to Martinez’s. Therefore Martinez’s right to file a domestic abuse complaint without having it disclosed to her abuser was not clearly established, and High couldn’t have had fair notice that her conduct violated Martinez’s rights.
Whether or not an alleged victim of government abuse can sue the officials responsible often depends on whether they can find a case with a nearly identical background. The practical effect of this is that qualified immunity drags out lawsuits by years and permits constitutional violations as long as they are novel.
While the Supreme Court has overturned some individual qualified immunity cases that were particularly outrageous—like one where correctional officers locked a psychiatric inmate in a cell filled with feces and raw sewage—it has continually declined to reconsider the doctrine as a whole.
Until it does, or until Congress gets its act together, plaintiffs like Martinez will have no recourse.
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