Whitaker v. Garcetti

486 F.3d 572, 2007 WL 1366069
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
DecidedMay 9, 2007
Docket05-55629, 05-55690
StatusPublished
Cited by226 cases

This text of 486 F.3d 572 (Whitaker v. Garcetti) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Whitaker v. Garcetti, 486 F.3d 572, 2007 WL 1366069 (9th Cir. 2007).

Opinion

GRABER, Circuit Judge.

Eight individual Plaintiffs allege that Defendants, who are individuals and entities associated with the City and County of Los Angeles, intercepted Plaintiffs’ telephone calls after having obtained wiretap authorizations by using falsified warrant applications. Plaintiffs also allege that Defendants unconstitutionally concealed the existence of the wiretaps by using a “handoff’ procedure. Plaintiffs sued Defendants under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for declaratory and monetary relief. 1 The district court granted summary judgment to Plaintiffs on their claim for declaratory relief on the handoff procedure, ruling that the procedure violates the Fourth Amendment. The district court granted summary judgment to Defendants on Plaintiffs’ claims for monetary relief, ruling that *575 Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477,114 S.Ct. 2364, 129 L.Ed.2d 383 (1994), barred Plaintiffs’ claim for damages from the alleged warrant falsification and that Defendants were entitled to qualified immunity on Plaintiffs’ claim for damages from the han-doff procedure. We hold that Plaintiff Whitaker’s claim alleging that the wiretap that intercepted his telephone call was obtained using a falsified warrant application may proceed against Defendants Williams, Lewis, Garcetti, Demerjian, the City of Los Angeles, and the County of Los Ange-les; none of the other claims can survive.

FACTUAL AND PROCEDURAL HISTORY

A. Overview

This case involves three sets of Plaintiffs and two sets of Defendants:

— Plaintiff Jack Whitaker, a lawyer;
— Plaintiffs Ramon Portillo, Avelino Avalos, Eduardo Martinez, Virginia Delgado, and Ricardo Carrizoza (“Portillo Plaintiffs”), who possessed 60 kilograms of cocaine;
— Plaintiffs Lauro Gaxiola and Antonio Gastelum, who possessed 190 kilograms of cocaine;
— Defendants Gil Garcetti, Curtis Ha-zell, David Demerjian, and Jason Lus-tig, who worked in the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, and the County of Los Angeles (“County Defendants”); and
— Defendants Willie Williams, Dan Harden, Horacio Marco, Chuck Livingston, and Keith Lewis, who worked in the Los Angeles Police Department, and the City of Los Angeles (“City Defendants”).

As summarized by the district court:

The events that gave birth to the instant dispute were two separate narcotics wiretap investigations conducted by the Los Angeles Police Department (“LAPD”). The first investigation revolved around Downey Communications (“Downey” and “the Downey wiretaps”), while the second revolved around the Atel Cellular and Pager Company (“Atel” and “the Atel wiretaps”). LAPD investigators supposedly suspected these companies of facilitating drug deals by providing cellular telephone and digital paging services to narcotics traffickers and money launderers. The Defendants then submitted to the Los Angeles Superior Court applications for wiretap orders, which included sworn affidavits in order to establish probable cause against Downey and Atel. In relying on the sworn statements within the affidavits, the Superior Court issued wiretap orders for the Downey and Atel wiretaps. Thus, the wiretaps were supposedly designed to further investigate' the suspected criminal activity of Downey Communications and Atel Cellular and Pager Company, and their respective principals and employees.
... The Los Angeles Superior Court granted the application to intercept nine telephone lines [of Downey] on November 8, 1994. Due to the numerous extensions of the wiretap order and expansions in the number of telephone lines tapped, Defendants intercepted over 30,-000 conversations that took place across thirty Downey telephone lines for a duration of 11 months.
... The Los Angeles Superior Court granted the application to intercept twenty-two telephone lines [of Atel] on May 21, 1996. Due to the myriad of extensions sought and obtained, Defendants were able to intercept dozens of thousands of conversations over the course of twenty-two months.
... [T]he Downey and Atel wiretaps uncovered substantial criminal activity, *576 although none on the part of any of the putatively targeted parties. While intercepting calls pursuant to these broad and enduring wiretaps, Defendants became aware of suspicious conduct on the part of Plaintiffs, although none of the Plaintiffs were so much as named in the wiretap orders or under investigation by the LAPD at the time of the orders. In other words, Plaintiffs were mere clients of Downey or Atel, or merely involved in conversations with clients of Downey or Atel, but as a result of the two wiretaps, were indirectly subjected to electronic sui-veillance. These electronic surveil-lances served as the soil out of which the investigations against Plaintiffs originally grew.

Whitaker v. Garcetti, 291 F.Supp.2d 1132, 1136-37 (C.D.Cal.2003) (footnotes omitted).

Plaintiffs allege that Defendants intentionally concealed the existence of the wiretaps from them through the use of a “handoff’ procedure. By Defendants’ own admission,

[t]he logistics of the procedure are rather simple. An investigative unit applies for and obtains a wiretap order from a judge. Pursuant to the wiretap order, the investigative unit conducts electronic surveillance and gathers specific evidence of imminent criminal conduct. Rather than arriving at the scene and making arrests after observing the criminal conduct, the investigating unit transmits the information to another unit without expressly stating that the delivering unit obtained the information via a wiretap. The receiving unit is given both the specific information gathered through the wiretap and the critical instruction to “investigate” the conduct, which, in law enforcement code, ... signifies that the receiving unit should arrive at the crime scene and, rather than execute an arrest, observe the illicit conduct in order to obtain what law enforcement refers to as “independent” probable cause.
Upon acquiring this so-called “independent” probable cause, the receiving unit either makes an immediate arrest or obtains a search warrant on the sole basis of the so-called “independent” probable cause. The criminally accused is then prosecuted without ever knowing that he was subjected to the wiretap surveillance, as no mention of the wiretap is made in any police reports, through any discovery disclosures, or by any testifying detectives at hearings or at trial (the testifying detectives, non-coincidentally, belong to the receiving unit). The conviction follows, yet the very existence of the wiretap is concealed from the criminally accused, in order to permit the survival of any pending investigations revolving around the wiretap.

Id. at 1138 (footnotes omitted).

B. The Three Sets of Plaintiffs

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
486 F.3d 572, 2007 WL 1366069, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/whitaker-v-garcetti-ca9-2007.