In Shuler v. City of Los Angeles, published April 5, 2021, the Second District Court of Appeal, Division 8 affirmed judgment on the pleadings for the defendant city. Police officers stopped the plaintiff's car and detained her during a narcotics investigation. They arrested her passenger on suspicion of drug dealing. The officers took the plaintiff and her car to a police station. An officer strip searched the plaintiff, told her to urinate in front of the officer, and kept her in a holding cell for two hours before releasing her without charges. The plaintiff sued the city and officers in federal court. She alleged violation of 42 U.S.C. section 1983, and state law claims including negligence. The court bifurcated the claims and tried the section 1983 claims to a jury. The jury found that the officers had arrested and strip searched the plaintiff, but that the arrest and search were reasonable and did not violate her Fourth Amendment rights. The federal court then declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over the plaintiff's state law claims and dismissed them without prejudice. The plaintiff then filed suit in state court asserting her state law claims. The state court granted judgment on the pleadings on the ground that the verdict in the federal case barred the state law claims.
The appellate court agreed. Collateral estoppel applied. The only element of collateral estoppel that the plaintiff disputed was whether the issues in the two proceedings were identical. Hernandez v. City of Pomona (2009) 46 Cal.4th 501 held that a federal verdict that a police use of lethal force was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment barred a negligence action under California law for the same use of force. Although this case involves a strip search instead of use of lethal force, the result is the same. The plaintiff contended that because the federal jury was instructed it had to find the search was intentional to find liability, the verdict did not preclude a negligence claim. But the intentional instruction did not relate to the issue of reasonableness. It only required that the jury find the officers intentional strip-searched the plaintiff, rather than accidentally. Whether the officers intentionally strip-searched her is not in dispute in the state court case. The dispute is over the reasonableness of the strip search. Since the federal jury found the search reasonable, and the reasonableness element is the same under state and federal law, the verdict that the search was reasonable bars the action.
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