With a wholesale disapproval of lower court opinions and a reaffirmance of one of its own, the Supreme Court in Leon v. County of Riverside today holds a broad government immunity statute isn’t as broad as many Courts of Appeal have been construing it.
Government Code section 821.6 protects public employees from liability “for injury caused by his instituting or prosecuting any judicial or administrative proceeding within the scope of his employment, even if he acts maliciously and without probable cause.” The court’s unanimous opinion by Justice Leondra Kruger concludes the statute “provid[es] immunity against liability for claims of injury based on tortious or wrongful prosecution” (i.e., “a public employee’s initiation or prosecution of an official proceeding”), but it “does not broadly immunize police officers or other public employees for any and all harmful actions they may take in the course of investigating crime.”
The court thus finds section 821.6 doesn’t preclude an action against sheriff’s deputies for negligence committed during an investigation — they left a murder victim’s body uncovered, with genitals exposed, for eight hours, leading the victim’s wife to sue for emotional distress. The court doesn’t rule out the possible applicability of other statutory immunities, however.
The court concludes that today’s holding is “essentially the same” as the one in Sullivan v. County of Los Angeles (1974) 12 Cal.3d 710, but says numerous Courts of Appeal “either understood Sullivan as limited to its facts . . . or ignored it altogether.” The court consequently disapproves 12 Court of Appeal decisions as well as reversing the published opinion of the Fourth District, Division Two, Court of Appeal in this case.
The court doesn’t mention a 2009 law review article critical of the disapproved line of Court of Appeal opinions, an article authored by Frank Menetrez, who now is a justice on the Court of Appeal that decided Leon, although he did not sit on the case. Menetrez, a former Horvitz & Levy attorney, wrote the article before becoming a judge.