In Rodriguez v. City of San Jose, published July 23, 2019, the 9th Circuit affirmed summary judgment for the defendant city, its police department, and a police officer in a lawsuit brought under 42 U.S.C. section 1983. Officers responded to the plaintiff's 911 call for a welfare check on her husband. The husband was ranting, mentioned shooting up schools, and stated he had a gun safe full of guns. The officers detained the husband under Welfare & Institutions Code section 5150 for 72 hours observation. After the husband was removed from the house, the plaintiff confirmed that there were firearms in the house. The officers found 12 firearms in the house--one registered to the plaintiff alone, the rest unregistered or registered to the husband. The plaintiff objected to the removal of her personal handgun. The officers confiscated all of the firearms. The husband was evaluated at the hospital, admitted, and released a week later. Later, the city filed a petition for forfeiture of the firearms. The plaintiff intervened, asserting personal ownership of her handgun and community ownership of the others. She asserted her Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, since she was not prohibited from possessing or owning guns. The court granted the city's petition. The state court of appeal affirmed that the seizure did not violate the plaintiff's Second Amendment rights. After the decision, the plaintiff changed the registration and ownership so that all the guns were in her name only, and obtained gun release clearances from the state department of justice. The city declined her request to return the guns. She then brought this lawsuit, joined by two gunowners' rights organizations. She asserted violations of her Second Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights.
The 9th Circuit affirmed the district court's decision that the warrantless seizure of the firearms did not violate the Fourth Amendment. The public health and safety protection exception to the warrant requirement applied. A seizure of a firearm in the possession or control of a person who has been detained because of an acute mental health episode responds to an immediate threat to community safety. When asking whether the seizure falls within an exception to the warrant requirement, three factors must be balanced, based on all the facts available to an objectively reasonable officer: The public safety interest; the urgency of that interest; and the individual property, liberty, and privacy interests. Here, the seizure of the guns from the home affected a serious private interest in the personal property kept in the home. But because the officers had probable cause to detain involuntarily an individual experiencing an acute mental health episode and send him for evaluation; the individual had threatened to use the firearms; and the officers did not know whether the hospital would detain the individual or keep him detained long enough to permit the officers to seek a warrant, the urgency of a significant public safety interest was sufficient to outweigh the significant property interest.
The 9th Circuit also concluded that the Second Amendment claim was precluded by the final decision of the state court, in which the plaintiff's Second Amendment rights were litigated. The addition of the advocacy groups as plaintiffs did not change the issue preclusion analysis, because they lacked institutional standing. They failed to show that the issue of whether a single gun owner's firearms should be returned either impeded their ability to carry out their mission or required them to divert substantial resources away from the organizations' preferred uses.
Comments