Opinion ID: 1277454
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: The Federal-Court Judgment

Text: ¶ 13 From the text of Judge Russell's ruling, we divine that Salazar's federal action was considered as divided into two parts  that which is related to his arrest and immediate detention and that which pertains to his ensuing three-day confinement. The former addressed the presence of federal constitutional infirmities in the arrest process and in the restraint that followed; the latter the reasonable length of post-arrest confinement that was viewed as measurable by City's exercise of that degree of care that was Salazar's due. ¶ 14 We will not pass on how much, if any, of the present state claim may be subject to preclusion. Moreover, it is not clear, on this record, which issues sought to be resolved in this state action City intended to bar by issue preclusion and which were relied upon as eliminated by City's immunity defense. At nisi prius City failed to identify with any modicum of precision the exact issues it sought to preclude by interposition of Judge Russell's rulings. We cannot pass on the preclusive force of those rulings without having the judgment roll. The journal entry alone will not suffice. When the roll is produced, arrest-related issues should be viewed separately from those that are detention-related. For the reasons to be explained in Part III infra, the latter (detention-related) issues that are rested on negligence in taking unreasonable time to identify Salazar clearly present a disputed fact for the jury. ¶ 15 Among City's multiple preclusion arguments that cannot be addressed absent a full federal-court judgment roll are: (1) whether any intentional acts of City's employees are precluded, (2) whether Salazar had full and fair opportunity to litigate the critical issues of probable cause and (3) what standards were appropriate for separately gauging the Salazar-pressed federal- or state-law infirmities. There is an even greater barrier to today's pronouncement upon the breadth of the preclusive force. We do not initially decide issues that were left unresolved by the first-instance court. [17] Were we to assume that the judgment roll was supportive of some preclusive elements, we could not now extend the bar of that defense (a) to Salazar's state-law argument that he was negligently detained for longer than necessary to ascertain his identity (as one other than the person for whom the arrest warrant issued), or (b) to the intentional acts, if any, by City officials. On this record, both of these concerns appear to present state-law questions of fact which went untendered in the previous federal-court controversy. [18]