Opinion ID: 6226276
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Spoliation of Evidence Other than the Handgun

Text: Mr. Murray’s parents argue that the Claims Court improperly found that the government did not spoliate any evidence other than the Hi-Point .380 handgun. They specifically argue that the Claims Court erred in holding that the government does not control evidence that it does not physically possess—a standard different than that applied to all other non-governmental civil litigants. They argue Case: 20-2182 Document: 57 Page: 9 Filed: 02/16/2022 JONES v. US 9 that key evidence, including evidence from Mr. Murray’s body, Officer Norton’s gun, and Officer Norton’s clothing, was in the government’s control and that the government had a duty to preserve that evidence. We agree that the Claims Court erred in applying a different definition of “control” to the government than that applied to all other civil litigants. By defining “control” to require that the government physically possess evidence rather than merely have a right to obtain or control that evidence, the Claims Court held the government to a lesser duty to preserve than other civil litigants. But, as the Claims Court has previously explained, the government has the same duty to ensure that relevant evidence is preserved as any litigant. United Med. Supply Co. v. United States, 77 Fed. Cl. 257, 274 (2007). Law enforcement officers are not held to a lower duty to preserve evidence than other civil litigants. Like any other civil litigant, the government “controls” evidence under the duty to preserve where it has a legal right to obtain or control that evidence. Physical possession is not a prerequisite to the imposition of a duty to preserve. See, e.g., Silvestri, 271 F.3d at 591 (explaining how the duty to preserve evidence applies to evidence to which the party has access but does not own). In fact, in other cases, the Claims Court has found that a party with a legal right to obtain or control relevant evidence has a duty to preserve that evidence, even where the party does not actually possess the evidence. See Spoliation Order, 146 Fed. Cl. at 738. It departed from that precedent in this case, holding that federal agents did not control evidence that they did not physically possess. Id. The Claims Court noted that federal agents had jurisdiction over the investigation into Mr. Murray’s death and, “[s]ubject to constitutional requirements and limits,” could have “searched or collected elements of the shooting scene,” “seized Officer Norton’s gun and clothes for testing and searched Officer Norton’s vehicle for Mr. Murray's blood,” or “detained Officer Norton to prevent him from tampering Case: 20-2182 Document: 57 Page: 10 Filed: 02/16/2022 10 JONES v. US with other shooting-scene elements.” Id. at 739. But the court ultimately held that “the federal agents’ limited authority to investigate and collect evidence of a crime” is not “the property-like right-to-control sufficient to find spoliation.” Id. at 738 The government argues that the Claims Court cor- rectly found no spoliation of any evidence other than the Hi-Point .380 handgun for five reasons. First, the government argues that the Claims Court correctly required physical possession of the evidence as a prerequisite to a duty to preserve. Second, the government argues that it was under no obligation to collect any particular evidence—any investigation into the crime scene was purely discretionary. Third, the government argues that its jurisdiction over the investigation did not provide it with control over the allegedly spoliated evidence. Fourth, the government argues that, despite ordering an autopsy of Mr. Murray’s body, it never exercised control over his body because the Medical Examiner did not comply with its request and never performed an autopsy. It further argues that no allegedly spoliated evidence on Mr. Murray’s body is relevant to Mr. Murray’s parents’ claims. Finally, the government argues that, even if the allegedly spoliated evidence was under its control, it had no duty to preserve that evidence because the FBI did not reasonably foresee civil litigation during its investigation. We have already explained that the Claims Court erred in requiring physical possession as a prerequisite to a duty to preserve. Thus, the government’s first argument fails. We address the government’s remaining four arguments in turn. The government’s second argument—that it had no duty to preserve evidence because it had no obligation to collect any evidence—conflates the minimum standards required in conducting a criminal investigation with the duty to preserve evidence applicable in this civil suit. In a criminal prosecution, the Due Process Clause does not “impos[e] on the police an undifferentiated and absolute duty to Case: 20-2182 Document: 57 Page: 11 Filed: 02/16/2022 JONES v. US 11 retain and to preserve all material that might be of conceivable evidentiary significance.” Arizona v. Youngblood, 488 U.S. 51, 58 (1988). The government and the Claims Court cite to several criminal and habeas corpus cases, including Youngblood, in support of the proposition that law enforcement does not control evidence that it is not required to collect and preserve under the Due Process Clause. These cases principally address constitutional requirements on law enforcement, which set a floor on collection duties but do not preclude additional non-constitutional requirements such as anti-spoliation duties in a civil case as a matter of judicial policy. Evidence in the government’s control for purposes of civil litigation does not mean evidence that the government had a legal requirement to obtain—it is evidence that the government had a legal right to obtain. And, to the limited extent the sources on which the government relies involve the executive branch’s non-constitutional policy choices, the choices are keyed to the mix of considerations relevant to a criminal prosecution. Such choices do not control the judicial system’s policy choices that define the duty to preserve evidence in a civil case. The government has not given us persuasive reasons to exempt it from the ordinary civil-case rules imposing a duty to preserve relevant evidence in its control for reasonably foreseeable civil litigation. Similarly unpersuasive are the government’s citations to cases addressing whether the United States is immune to suit under the Federal Tort Claims Act for law enforcements’ discretionary actions, such as Gonzalez v. United States, 814 F.3d 1022 (9th Cir. 2016). Gonzalez and other Federal Tort Claims Act cases raised by the government, like the criminal cases and habeas corpus cases cited by the government and the Claims Court, address what steps law enforcement is required to take—not what evidence law enforcement has a right to control. Those Federal Tort Claims Act cases, thus, provide no guidance in our application of the civil-litigation duty to preserve evidence. Case: 20-2182 Document: 57 Page: 12 Filed: 02/16/2022 12 JONES v. US The government and the Claims Court identify four civil cases from other circuit and district courts that do not arise in the Federal Tort Claims Act context. These cases, as we explain here, either say nothing about the government’s duty to preserve evidence for civil litigation, are unpersuasive, or support our holding that the normal duty to preserve evidence applies to the government. The government cites Cunningham v. City of Wenatchee, in which the Ninth Circuit held that a police officer’s failure to record exculpatory evidence in a criminal investigation was not a civil rights violation under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. 345 F.3d 802, 812 (9th Cir. 2003). Although Cunningham was a civil case, the issue there was whether police had violated the Due Process Clause by failing to gather and preserve exculpatory evidence in their criminal investigation. Id. The Ninth Circuit correctly applied the Youngblood standard applicable to allegations of a denial of due process stemming from the collection and preservation of evidence in criminal investigations and prosecutions. But the court did not consider the issue of spoliation of evidence. A party may breach its duty to preserve evidence for civil litigation even where that failure to preserve evidence does not rise to the level of a due process violation. Thus, Cunningham provides no guidance as to the government’s duty to preserve evidence in civil cases. The government also cites Howell v. Earl, where a magistrate judge in the District of Montana recommended against finding that a highway patrol trooper spoliated evidence when he did not record his conversation with a woman who later sued the state. No. 13-cv-48-BU-DWMJCL, 2014 WL 2761352 (D. Mont. June 3, 2014), report and recommendation adopted, 2014 WL 2761342 (D. Mont. June 18, 2014). The magistrate judge stated that “[l]aw enforcement officers have no affirmative legal duty to gather and collect evidence, but are obligated to preserve evidence once it is gathered.” Id. at . No party objected to the magistrate’s recommendation, which the district Case: 20-2182 Document: 57 Page: 13 Filed: 02/16/2022 JONES v. US 13 court judge adopted after finding no clear error in the mag- istrate’s spoliation analysis. Howell, 2014 WL 2761342, at . This non-precedential district court decision is not binding on this court. As we have already explained, control requires only a legal right to obtain evidence, not a legal requirement to obtain evidence. Thus, we decline to follow the example set by the District of Montana in that single non-precedential order. In addition to the cases cited by the government in its brief on appeal, the Claims Court identified two cases where other courts have denied spoliation sanctions against the government in civil cases, Estate of Trentadue ex rel. Aguilar v. United States, 397 F.3d 840 (10th Cir. 2005), and Tchatat v. O’Hara, 249 F. Supp. 3d 701 (S.D.N.Y. 2017), objections overruled, No. 14 CIV. 2385 (LGS), 2017 WL 3172715 (S.D.N.Y. July 25, 2017), aff’d sub nom., Tchatat v. City of New York, 795 F. App’x 34 (2d Cir. 2019). The Claims Court read those cases as establishing a rule that courts “refuse to use spoliation sanctions to impose on law enforcement a duty to collect evidence.” Spoliation Order, 146 Fed. Cl. at 740. But those cases do not stand for that proposition. Rather, the courts in those cases applied the familiar duty to preserve that applies to all civil litigants in the applicable jurisdictions and, based on the specific facts of the cases before them, did not abuse their discretion in denying spoliation sanctions. The Claims Court mischaracterized the Tenth Circuit’s decision in Trentadue by conflating the evidentiary ruling of spoliation with the tort of intentional destruction of evidence. The Claims Court said that “the Tenth Circuit affirmed the trial court’s holding that the prison officials’ next-day cleaning and repainting of the inmate’s cell did not constitute intentional destruction of evidence that could be sanctioned as spoliation.” Id. But that is not what the Tenth Circuit held. Rather, it affirmed the trial court’s holding that, under Oklahoma law, intentional destruction of evidence is not a recognized tort. Trentadue, 397 F.3d at Case: 20-2182 Document: 57 Page: 14 Filed: 02/16/2022 14 JONES v. US 861–62. It separately affirmed the trial court’s selection of a sanction for the loss of evidence. Id. at 862–63. The district court in Trentadue also recognized that its evidentiary rulings were separate from its holding on tort liability. It noted that, while Oklahoma does not recognize the tort of intentional destruction of evidence, “[t]his is not to suggest, however, that the court has not properly taken into account plaintiffs[’] claims that certain important items of relevant evidence in this case were destroyed, lost or shown to be inaccurate.” Estate of Trentadue v. United States, No. CIV-97-849-L, 2001 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 25864, at  (W.D. Okla. May 1, 2001). In fact, the district court did apply sanctions for the loss of evidence, stating that, “[w]here appropriate, the court has drawn reasonable inferences from the circumstances surrounding lost or inaccurate evidence in deciding what weight should be given to that evidence.” Id. It just did not apply an adverse inference. See id. The Tenth Circuit, moreover, did not import the Youngblood standard to the civil-litigation spoliation context as the Claims Court did here. Rather, it seems to have applied the familiar civil litigation spoliation standard, which, under Oklahoma law, permits a sanction of an adverse inference “only in cases of willful destruction or suppression.” Trentadue, 397 F.3d at 864 (quoting Beverly v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 3 P.3d 163, 165 (Okla. Civ. App. 1999)) (internal quotation marks and brackets omitted). Trentadue, therefore, does not support the Claims Court’s departure from the familiar duty to preserve evidence for civil litigation. The Claims Court also mischaracterized the holding in Tchatat, where a magistrate judge found that the New York Police Department did not spoliate evidence from the scene of an alleged shoplifting that it failed to collect, or collected but failed to preserve. The Claims Court stated that the Tchatat court held “that the Supreme Court’s Case: 20-2182 Document: 57 Page: 15 Filed: 02/16/2022 JONES v. US 15 limits on law enforcement’s Brady obligations in Youngblood precluded the court from finding a spoliationrelated duty for the officers” 3 to collect and preserve evidence. See Spoliation Order, 146 Fed. Cl. at 740. To the contrary, however, the district court in Tchatat held law enforcement to the familiar duty to preserve evidence. In doing so, it simply found that police officers had no duty to preserve the allegedly spoliated evidence at issue because Mr. Tchatat’s later civil litigation was not “reasonably foreseeable” while they had control of the evidence. Tchatat, 249 F.Supp.3d at 708–09. The district court’s subsequent discussion of law enforcement’s Brady obligations is dicta. Mr. Tchatat argued that the police’s duty to collect and preserve evidence in his criminal prosecution transferred to his later civil suit. Id. at 709. In response to this argument, the district court noted that, “even if [it] were to import the Brady and related obligations arising from criminal prosecutions into the spoliation analysis,” those obligations only required disclosures (and therefore preservation) of evidence for use at the criminal trial. Id. at 709–10. The district court explained that “any purported preservation obligation was extinguished on acquittal, long before [Mr. Tchatat’s civil] action was brought,” and thus “no spoliation sanction can issue.” Id. at 710. Thus, contrary to the Claims Court’s representation, the district court in Tchatat did not “apply[] Youngblood to limit the application of spoliation sanctions to law enforcement in a civil case.” See Spoliation Order, 146 Fed. Cl. at 739. We have found no cases in which any of our sister cir- cuits have adopted the Youngblood standard to lessen the 3 In Brady v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that, in a prosecution, the Due Process Clause requires the government to turn over material evidence in its possession that is favorable to the accused. 373 U.S. 83, 87 (1963) Case: 20-2182 Document: 57 Page: 16 Filed: 02/16/2022 16 JONES v. US government’s duty to preserve evidence that may be relevant to reasonably foreseeable civil litigation. The few relevant cases identified by the parties and the Claims Court, with the exception of the District of Montana’s non-precedential order in Howell, apply the same duty to preserve evidence on law enforcement as on every other civil litigant. We will not depart from that pattern and exempt law enforcement from its duty to preserve relevant evidence within its control where litigation is reasonably foreseeable. The Claims Court expressed concern that applying the familiar duty to preserve evidence would create an “openended duty for law enforcement to investigate to future litigants’ standards.” Spoliation Order, 146 Fed. Cl. at 739. The Claims Court’s fears are unfounded as “control” is not the sole requirement of a party’s duty to preserve—the duty to preserve is further limited in scope to relevant evidence and limited in time to when litigation becomes reasonably foreseeable. See Micron, 645 F.3d at 1320 (The “obligation to preserve evidence arises when the party has notice that the evidence is relevant to litigation . . . as for example when a party should have known that the evidence may be relevant to future litigation.” (quoting Kronisch v. United States, 150 F.3d 112, 126 (2d Cir.1998))). Moreover, as we explain below, law enforcement’s “control” over an investigation scene is not unlimited and, therefore, neither is its duty to preserve evidence on that investigation scene. We now address the government’s third argument— that its jurisdiction over the investigation did not provide it with control over the allegedly spoliated evidence. As we have already explained, a party, including the government, controls evidence under the duty to preserve where it has a legal right to obtain or control that evidence. Thus, the government may have control over evidence where it has jurisdiction to investigate an incident if its jurisdiction gives it the right to obtain or control that evidence. We stop Case: 20-2182 Document: 57 Page: 17 Filed: 02/16/2022 JONES v. US 17 short of holding that the government always controls all evidence on an investigation scene. The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution constrains the government’s legal right to obtain or control evidence in an investigation. As the Claims Court noted, the extent of the government’s control over an investigation scene is dependent on its suspicion of a crime. Spoliation Order, 146 Fed. Cl. at 739. The government could not have, for example, taken Officer Norton into custody absent probable cause. See Dunaway v. New York, 442 U.S. 200, 216 (1979). The inverse of this statement is also true: If the FBI had probable cause, it had a legal right to take Officer Norton into custody, as well as control over the evidence on his person. Mr. Murray’s parents urge us to find that the government had control over all allegedly spoliated evidence. While it is true that the government’s right to control evidence extends well beyond the Hi-Point .380 handgun, the extent of its control and other elements of the spoliation standard (such as reasonable foreseeability of litigation) are factual questions that we leave for the Claims Court to decide in the first instance. Turning to the government’s fourth argument—that the government lacked control over Mr. Murray’s body despite ordering an autopsy—we similarly remand this factual issue for the Claims Court to decide as necessary in the first instance. We are unpersuaded by the government’s alternative argument that there was no spoliation of evidence that could have been obtained from Mr. Murray’s body because, as the Claims Court found, the mishandling of the body was irrelevant. It is true that the Claims Court found that the mistreatment of Mr. Murray’s body that occurred when officers photographed themselves inserting their fingers in the deceased Mr. Murray’s head wound, stabbed him in the heart with a syringe, and cut open his neck—“while grossly inappropriate—did not otherwise affect evidence relevant Case: 20-2182 Document: 57 Page: 18 Filed: 02/16/2022 18 JONES v. US to the plaintiffs’ claims about the cause of Mr. Murray’s death” and, thus, is not a basis for spoliation sanctions. Spoliation Order, 146 Fed. Cl. at 737. But Mr. Murray’s parents’ spoliation allegations, as they relate to Mr. Murray’s body, are not limited to those grossly inappropriate acts. Mr. Murray’s parents also allege spoliation stemming from the FBI’s failure to enforce its request for an autopsy and failure to bag Mr. Murray’s hands. Appellant’s Princ. Br. 24–25. The Claims Court made no relevancy determinations as to that evidence and must decide on remand whether the government spoliated that evidence. As to the government’s fifth argument—that it could not reasonably foresee the prospect of civil litigation while it had control over the investigation scene—we think it advisable to remand for further consideration of this issue. The government asserts that “when the FBI was at the scene and able to collect evidence, future civil litigation over the manner of Mr. Murray’s death was not reasonably foreseeable.” Appellee’s Br. 28. The Claims Court rejected the government’s similar argument that litigation was not reasonably foreseeable when the gun was destroyed 4— finding that “[l]itigation involving the gun was reasonably foreseeable when the gun was destroyed” in December 2008 and that, “ ‘in light of the seriousness of the incident and the involvement of officers on the Reservation where they did not have jurisdiction, litigation could reasonably be expected.’ ” Spoliation Order, 146 Fed. Cl. at 741 (quoting Jones v. Norton, No. 2:09-CV-730-TC, 2014 WL 909569, at  (D. Utah Mar. 7, 2014), aff’d, 809 F.3d 564 (10th Cir. 2015)). It is not clear whether the Claims Court determined that litigation was reasonably foreseeable only as of 4 The government does not appeal the Claims Court’s finding that the litigation was reasonably foreseeable as of December 2008 and we do not disturb that finding. Case: 20-2182 Document: 57 Page: 19 Filed: 02/16/2022 JONES v. US 19 December 2008, or whether litigation was reasonably foreseeable earlier in the investigation as well. We remand for the Claims Court to clarify, as necessary, whether litigation was reasonably foreseeable while the government had control (as we define it here) over any allegedly spoliated evidence other than the spoliated Hi-Point .380 handgun. 5