High Court Restricts Damages for Brutality

The Supreme Court on Monday shielded cities and counties from being forced to pay damages in federal court for most acts of police brutality, ruling that the hiring of a violence-prone officer is not enough to justify holding the county liable for the injuries he inflicted.

In a 5-4 decision in an Oklahoma case, the court stressed that local governments are not responsible under federal law for injuries inflicted by their employees unless they have an official “policy” or regular practice of violating the rights of citizens.

Hiring a rogue cop with a criminal record may have been a mistake, the justices said, but it does not prove that the county deliberately intended to violate a person’s rights.

Monday’s decision will make it harder for civil rights plaintiffs and their lawyers to recover large awards, not just in police cases but in suits involving everything from discriminatory hiring and illegal searches to sexual harassment claims and free-speech violations.

The impact of the ruling in California is uncertain.

Civil rights lawyer Stephen Yagman said the decision will have virtually no impact. He said it merely raises an already high burden of proof in a small number of cases that allege that the government was negligent in hiring someone.

“It’s as narrow as that,” he said. “There’s nothing more to it.”

Furthermore, Yagman said, the decision is irrelevant for California and most other large states that, unlike Oklahoma, require government entities to pay most judgments against public employees.

California law requires that compensatory damages be paid when employees are held liable for acts committed during the course of their normal duties. It makes payment of punitive damages optional.

In the Oklahoma case, the high court threw out a $796,000 verdict against a county that hired a hot-tempered young officer, who was the sheriff’s nephew. In his sixth day on the job, the officer pulled a young woman from a pickup truck and hurled her to the pavement, causing irreparable injuries to her knees.

The woman, Jill Brown, already has spent $130,000 in medical bills and faces the replacement of both knees.

The court majority called the hiring of this officer “a one-time negligent administration” that does not warrant holding the county liable.

These plaintiffs can continue to bring suits against individual officers or county employees who violate their rights but not against the county itself in most instances.

Most states do not allow big-money lawsuits against themselves, their officials or their agencies. Oklahoma law limits damage awards against its local governments to $100,000.

As a result, most claims are brought under federal law.

Reaction to the decision was mixed in Southern California.

Los Angeles City Atty. James K. Hahn, whose office defends police and other city employees, said the decision might herald a return to the original purpose of civil rights laws--as tools against government entities that systematically violate civil rights, rather than as vehicles to sue over occasional police brutality.

“This could narrow a lot of the expansion of civil rights laws,” said Hahn, who emphasized that he had not yet read the ruling and was basing his comments on news accounts.

But on a practical level, Hahn said, the decision might merely result in a shift of more cases from federal to state courts, as lawyers seek to avoid the difficult task of proving that a locality has a regular practice of violating citizens’ rights.

In California courts, Hahn said, a municipality can be held liable for the bad acts of an employee without proof that it tolerates such acts.

Robert Ambrose, assistant Los Angeles County counsel, said the ruling “sounds like a plus for the defense of police officers of the county and all localities.” While he stressed that he had not studied the case in depth, Ambrose said he welcomed it as a possible way to limit the number of lawsuits alleging misconduct by sheriff’s deputies. Many of those suits, he contended, “seem baseless and repetitious.”

Los Angeles attorney Carol Watson, who has represented many victims of alleged police brutality, predicted that the Supreme Court decision would make it more difficult to sue local governments and might even encourage police misconduct.

“What the court is doing is blaming the victim and making it harder for the victims to bring these matters to court,” said Watson, who co-chairs Police Watch, an agency that refers victims of police misconduct to legal assistance. The ruling in the Oklahoma case, she added, may relieve local governments and police departments from feeling responsible for officers’ actions and “may promote the conduct people ought to be responsible for.”

For the last 20 years, the Supreme Court has been closely divided over when local governments--and not just individual officers or employees--can be forced to pay damages. The cases turn on the meaning of the landmark post-Civil War law that allowed federal lawsuits against state or local officials who, “acting under color of law,” violate another’s rights.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the conservative majority, worried about the “great risk” of holding municipalities and their taxpayers liable for injuries that their officials did not deliberately cause.

Local governments must not “be held liable unless deliberate action attributable to the municipality directly caused a deprivation of federal rights,” she wrote.

Jill Brown and her husband had been driving home near the Texas line late one night in May 1991, when Oklahoma sheriff’s deputies pursued them. It is not clear why, but they stopped the truck, and Deputy Stacy Burns grabbed the woman and threw her to the ground. No criminal charges were filed against the Browns.

She later sued in federal court, charging excessive use of force and unlawful arrest.

On the witness stand, Sheriff B.T. Moore admitted that he had not read all the way through the computer printout of charges against Burns before hiring him.

A jury in Sherman, Texas, awarded Brown $20,000 in damages against Burns and $796,000 against Bryan County, Okla.

The U.S. court of appeals in New Orleans upheld the damage verdict against the county in 1995 because the sheriff’s action showed a “deliberate indifference to the public’s welfare.”

Reversing that ruling (Bryan County vs. Brown, 95-1100), the high court said that the county “is not liable for Sheriff Moore’s isolated decision to hire Burns.”

The four more liberal justices expressed concern about victims of brutality who would be left uncompensated for their injuries. Justice David H. Souter faulted the majority for making it “a virtually categorical impossibility” to hold local governments responsible in cases such as this. He was joined in dissent by Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.

“This is a real blow to civil rights plaintiffs,” said USC law professor Erwin Chemerinsky. “This makes it much harder for them to prevail against a municipality unless you have something systemic, a pattern of violations.”

But an attorney who represented the county called the ruling a victory for taxpayers.

“There is no upper limit to damages in federal court. For a small city, these verdicts can be crippling. So this is good news for taxpayers,” said Wallace Jefferson, a lawyer in San Antonio.

Times staff writers Larry Gordon and Matt Lait contributed to this story from Los Angeles.