Judge tosses out much of suit filed by St. Louis man held in jail by mistake

[alp227]

Source: STL Post-Dispatch

ST. LOUIS • A federal judge tossed out late Friday the bulk of a lawsuit filed by a man who spent two months in jail here on someone else’s charges.

Cedric Wright filed a series of constitutional claims in 2012 against St. Louis police officials, officers, employees and the Board of Police Commissioners, as well as officials and employees of the sheriff’s office and the city division of corrections.

Attorneys for the defendants asked U.S. District Court Judge Audrey Fleissig to rule in their favor without a trial. She did that Friday, except for a single count against a sheriff’s deputy, Benjamin Goins Jr.

Reached Friday evening, Wright’s attorney, James Hacking, said he was “disappointed” but “respected” the ruling.

Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/judge-tosses-out-much-of-suit-filed-by-st-louis/article_52a1db72-9fdb-5965-a45c-6af3b3f77707.html

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Fleissig is an Obama nominee to the court - not even Democratic judges are reliable on wrongful detention issues! ARGH

[RKP5637]

1. Seems we're becoming more and more a nation of guilty until proven innocent. n/t

[SoapBox]

2. +100

[IDemo]

6. Or simply guilty, period.

[Phlem]

11. except if your a cop shooting at people.

[RKP5637]

12. Yeah, that seems to give cops a free pass, few questions asked. Yet another of

my many WTF's.

[Recursion]

3. The case against the guy who actually screwed up stands

The case against the other guards who assumed Goins hadn't "lost" a court order freeing Wright, and who were presented a man who responded to "Leonard". She probably should have let the board case go through, and even she said that was a very close call.

[4b5f940728b232b034e4]

4. Why do so many judges...

have no idea what they're doing? It's like the lawyer class promotes the worst of their kind out of their profession to get rid of them. The software industry has the same problem.

[Ex Lurker]

5. The Federal judge in my district is a former city judge

He went from small claims cases and traffic tickets straight to the Federal bench.

[Jim Lane]

8. Judges are constrained by the law.

The prevailing legal standard on DU seems to be "which side are we rooting for." The standard in court is "which side is entitled to win under the rules that are set forth, whether or not I agree with those rules."

In this case, the individual officer who acted improperly is on the hook and is still in the case. The question is what the plaintiff has to prove to recover against the governmental entity that employs the wrongdoer. Mere employment is not enough:

Hence, the government entity – as opposed to the individual government employee or agent – is liable only for acts of its employee or agent that stem from a “custom, policy or practice” of the entity, and not from an individual aberration or isolated act, even one committed “under color of law.”

That summary is from a manual for Legal Aid attorneys. According to the linked article, the judge in this case considered the evidence of "pattern or practice" and found it wanting.

If you think this standard is wrong and that the governmental entity should always be liable, even for an individual aberration, don't blame the District Court judge who enforced the existing law.

[Psephos]

13. An insightful post. n/t

[blackspade]

7. This seems like a terrible ruling...

That protects the establishment and throws an officer under the bus (not that he shouldn't be there, he should have company).

The article is also so poorly written it raises more questions than it answers.
Journalism appears to be a lost art at this point.

[christx30]

9. I wish individual

officers would be thrown under the bus for mistakes. Maybe if a few lost their jobs, pensions and homes for stupid mistakes, the others would be more careful about peoples' lives they ruin.

[blackspade]

10. I'm not saying that this guy shouldn't go down

I think he needs some company, because this is a systemic problem, beyond the offending officer.

[Massacure]

14. What evidence do you have of it being a systemic problem?

82 people over six and a half years in a county that probably books several tens of thousands of people a year. My greatest concern is what sort of compensation they receive for it. A quick Google search returns a summary of state statues for wrongly convicted people, but nothing about people wrongly jailed but released before conviction.

[blackspade]

15. Tens of thousands? Citation?

82 people is a systemic problem.
Not the one I was thinking but thanks for the heads up.

The systemic problem in that there appears to be no checks and balances within the system that would prevent abuses of power such as this.

One person makes this kind of decision? You don't see this as a systemic problem? Where was the paperwork? who checked it? Why isn't it cross checked?
The systemic problem is gross unaccountability within the 'legal' system. Once they have a body in custody, the ID apparently really doesn't matter.