James Zuegel v. Marco Garcia

• Court: Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
• Decided: March 8, 2024
• Docket: 22-17021
• Status: Unpublished

Opinion

NOT FOR PUBLICATION FILED UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS MAR 8 2024 MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK U.S. COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

JAMES R. ZUEGEL, No. 22-17021

Plaintiff-Appellant, D.C. No. 5:21-cv-07538-BLF

v. MEMORANDUM* MARCO GARCIA, Officer; PATRICK WARD, Officer; BRITTON MOORE, Officer; CITY OF MOUNTAIN VIEW,

Defendants-Appellees.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of California Beth Labson Freeman, District Judge, Presiding

Argued and Submitted February 12, 2024 San Francisco, California

Before: MILLER, BADE, and VANDYKE, Circuit Judges.

James Zuegel appeals from the dismissal of his second 42 U.S.C. § 1983

action arising from his May 2015 arrest, which was also the basis for his first

§ 1983 action.1 Zuegel challenges the district court’s determination that his Fourth

* This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3. 1 We address Zuegel’s claims in his first § 1983 action in a separate disposition, Zuegel v. Mountain View Police Department, No. 21-16277. Amendment false arrest claim remains barred by the doctrine of Heck v.

Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477, 486–87 (1994). We review de novo, Lopez-Valenzuela

v. Arpaio, 770 F.3d 772, 777 (9th Cir. 2014) (en banc), and we affirm.

1. Under Heck, a claim for damages under § 1983 is barred when

success on that claim “would necessarily imply the invalidity of his conviction or

sentence.” Heck, 512 U.S. at 487. To recover damages under § 1983, a plaintiff

must satisfy the favorable termination requirement by “prov[ing] that the

conviction or sentence has been reversed on direct appeal, expunged by executive

order, declared invalid by a state tribunal . . . or called into question by a federal

court’s issuance of a writ of habeas corpus.” Id. at 486–87. In a related appeal,

Zuegel v. Mountain View Police Department, No. 21-16277, we affirmed the

district court’s determination that Zuegel’s Fourth Amendment false arrest claim is

Heck-barred.

2. Zuegel has not satisfied Heck’s favorable termination requirement;

instead, he asserts that the “Heck-bar lifted after [his] probation expired,

terminating his constructive custody.” Zuegel asserts that he pursued relief in state

habeas corpus proceedings, which ended when the Supreme Court of California

denied relief on July 10, 2019. He did not file a federal habeas petition because he

believed that he would be unable to complete a federal proceeding before his

probation ended on September 30, 2019, and that the termination of his probation

2 would render a federal habeas petition moot. Thus, he argues that under Spencer v.

Kemna, 523 U.S. 1 (1998), he may bring his claims under § 1983 without

satisfying Heck’s favorable termination requirement.

In Spencer, the petitioner filed a federal habeas petition seeking to invalidate

an order revoking his parole. Id. at 3. Because the petitioner had completed his

entire sentence, the Supreme Court found the petition moot because it no longer

presented a case or controversy under Article III. Id. at 3, 12–16. The Court

explained that after a sentence has expired, “some concrete and continuing injury

other than the now-ended incarceration or parole—some ‘collateral consequence’

of the conviction—must exist if the suit is to be maintained.” Id. at 7. The Court

stated that it has “been willing to presume that a wrongful conviction has

continuing collateral consequences,” id. at 8, but it declined to extend that

presumption “to the area of parole revocation,” id. at 12, 14. In a concurrence

(joined by three other justices), Justice Souter determined that, to avoid an

“anomaly,” id. at 20, “[t]he better view [] is that a former prisoner, no longer ‘in

custody,’ may bring a § 1983 action establishing the unconstitutionality of a

conviction or confinement without being bound [by Heck’s] favorable-termination

requirement that it would be impossible as a matter of law for him to satisfy.” Id.

at 20–21; see Galanati v. Nev. Dep’t. of Corrs., 65 F.4th 1152, 1155 (9th Cir.

2023) (explaining that Spencer suggested that Heck does not bar a §1983 claim if it

3 would be impossible as a matter of law for a plaintiff to meet the favorable

termination requirement due to the unavailability of habeas relief (citing Spencer,

523 U.S. at 21) (Souter, J., concurring)).

We have previously stated that the exception to Heck, as suggested in

Spencer, is limited to “former prisoners challenging loss of good-time credits,

revocation of parole or similar matters; the status of prisoners challenging their

underlying convictions or sentences does not change upon release, because they

continue to be able to petition for a writ of habeas corpus.” Nonnette v. Small, 316

F.3d 872, 878 n.7 (9th Cir. 2002); see id. at 875–76 (holding that Heck did not bar

an ex-prisoner’s § 1983 claim challenging the “deprivation of good-time credits”

because he could no longer bring that claim in a habeas petition after his release

from custody); see also Guerrero v. Gates, 442 F.3d 697, 703–05 (9th Cir. 2006)

(holding that, even though the plaintiff was out of custody, Heck barred wrongful

arrest, malicious prosecution, and conspiracy claims because they attacked his

conviction and “his failure timely to achieve habeas relief [was] self-imposed,” id.

at 705); Galanti, 65 F.4th at 1156 (explaining the distinction between a challenge

to an underlying conviction or sentence and a challenge to the loss of prison credit

deductions). Under the reasoning of these cases, the narrow exception to the Heck

bar is unavailable to Zuegel because he is challenging the validity of his

4 conviction, not the loss of prison credits, revocation of parole, or similar matters.2

See Nonnette, 316 F.3d at 878 n.7.

AFFIRMED.

2 Even if the narrow exception to Heck could apply here, Zuegel would not be entitled to such relief because he has not diligently pursued it. See Galanti, 65 F.4th at 1156 (discussing diligence requirement). Zuegel did not file a direct appeal and he did not commence state post-conviction proceedings until fifteen months after he pled no contest. California Rule of Court 8.853(a) (providing a thirty-day deadline to initiate direct review). His delay in pursuing state post- conviction proceedings allowed the statute of limitations for seeking federal habeas corpus relief to expire. See 28 U.S.C. § 2244(d); Cunningham v. Gates, 312 F.3d 1148, 1153 n.3 (9th Cir. 2002) (stating that “failure [to timely] pursue [federal] habeas remedies” does not protect against Heck).