Opinion ID: 3065436
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Berry v. Baca, 370 F.3d 764.

Text: On May 29, 2003, the district court granted Baca’s motion for summary judgment based on the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Brass v. County of Los Angeles, 328 F.3d 1192 (9th Cir. 2003). Plaintiffs appealed and we reversed and remanded. Id. at 773. We first set forth the applicable law and explained the district court’s ruling as follows: In order to hold Baca liable under § 1983, plaintiffs must demonstrate that “ ‘action pursuant to official municipal policy of some nature caused a constitutional tort.’ ” Brass, 328 F.3d at 1198 (quoting Monell, 436 U.S. at 691 . . .). We have stated that “a local governmental body may be liable if it has a policy of inaction and such inaction amounts to a failure to protect constitutional rights.” Oviatt v. Pearce, 954 F.2d 1470, 1474 (9th Cir. 1992) (citing City of Canton v. Harris, 489 U.S. 378, 388, . . . (1989)). However, the policy of inaction must be more than mere negligence, see Daniels v. Williams, 474 U.S. 327, 333-36, . . . (1986); it must be a con- scious or deliberate choice among various alterna2088 MORTIMER v. BACA tives. See Lee v. City of Los Angeles, 250 F.3d 668, 681 (9th Cir.2001). In order to impose liability based on a policy of deliberate inaction, the “plaintiff must establish: (1) that he possessed a constitutional right of which he was deprived; (2) that the municipality had a policy; (3) that this policy ‘amounts to deliberate indifference’ to the plaintiff’s constitutional right; and (4) that the policy [was] the ‘moving force behind the constitutional violation.’ ” Oviatt, 954 F.2d at 1474 (quoting City of Canton, 489 U.S. at 389-91, . . . ). The district court did not discuss this four-step showing, because it did not address the plaintiffs’ claims that the County’s policies amount to a policy of deliberate indifference to their constitutional rights. Instead, the district court found that it “is bound by the holding in Brass and finds that the County’s challenged policies did not result in a violation of the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.” Id. at 767. We then found that Brass was distinguishable. We noted that “Brass’s primary claim focused on the County’s policy of releasing prisoners pursuant to court order only after the completion of processing all inmates scheduled for release on that day.” Id. at 768. We explained: Here, in contrast to Brass, the plaintiffs do not limit their challenge to the County’s specific policies. Rather, as argued in their briefs to this Court, they challenge the policy “in toto . . . that simply delays all releases until the system, in its sweet time, and with the resources it chooses . . . is ready to make releases.” Stated another way, the plaintiffs in this case challenge the implementation of the County’s MORTIMER v. BACA 2089 policies, rather than the specific policies themselves. They claim that the County’s unreasonably inefficient implementation of its administrative policies amounts to a policy of deliberate indifference to their constitutional rights. While on first glance this may appear a subtle difference, in fact there is a crucial distinction between the challenge to specific policies in Brass and the challenge to the implementation of the policy “in toto” in this case. It cannot be the case that, if the County’s system of administratively processing releases took several days or weeks to complete, its policy could not be challenged as one of “deliberate indifference” simply because each of the administrative procedures employed is theoretically reasonable. As a matter of law, the County’s system of administrative processing cannot be immune from allegations that, in practice, it amounts to a policy of deliberate indifference. Brass did not raise this type of challenge, because Brass focused his challenge upon the County’s release policies themselves. Tellingly, nowhere in the Brass opinion does the panel discuss the “deliberate indifference” line of Monell cases, because this was not the claim at issue. Here, in contrast, deliberate indifference is precisely the claim at issue. Id. at 768. We then found the case to be more closely related to Oviatt v. Pearce, 954 F.2d 1470, where the plaintiff alleged that he had been held without arraignment for 114 days because the county’s “policy regarding missed arraignments constituted a policy of deliberate indifference to the inmates’ constitutional rights.” Berry, 379 F.3d at 768-69. The panel noted that Berry concerned only 29 hours of over-detention rather than 114 days, and that the defendants had offered “more substantial 2090 MORTIMER v. BACA justifications for its delay,” but concluded that at the summary judgment stage the Oviatt framework applied. Id. at 769. A the end of the opinion, the panel returned to “Oviatt’s four-step framework for resolving Monell claims of deliberate indifference.” Id. at 773. The court commented: In order to impose liability based on a policy of deliberate inaction, the plaintiff must establish that he possessed a constitutional right of which he was deprived. Here, the plaintiffs possessed a constitutional right to freedom from imprisonment a reasonable time after they were judicially determined to be innocent of the charges against them. See Oviatt, 954 F.2d at 1474 (stating that “[t]he Supreme Court has recognized that an individual has a liberty interest in being free from incarceration absent a criminal conviction”); cf. Brass, 328 F.3d at 1200 (recognizing that the plaintiff “may have had a due process right to be released within a reasonable time after the reason for his detention ended”). Step two of Oviatt — the existence of a municipal policy — is uncontested. Both parties agree that the County has a set of administrative policies that guide releases after judicial determinations of innocence. Both parties also agree on step four: these policies resulted in delays in the release of each of the plaintiffs, ranging from twenty-six to twenty-nine hours after their court-ordered release. Step three of Oviatt remains: did this set of policies — or, alternatively, the lack of policies to expedite the process — amount to a policy of deliberate indifference to the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights? This question turns on whether the County’s implementation of its policies was reasonable in light of the delay that resulted. Baca concedes that he knew that MORTIMER v. BACA 2091 the implementation of the County’s policies was resulting in delays of up to 48 hours. Therefore, if the delays were not reasonably justified, the § 1983 claim against the County has merit, because the County was continuing to adhere to a policy that it knew resulted in unlawful detentions without reasonable cause. See Bd. of County Comm’rs v. Brown, 520 U.S. 397, 407, . . . (1997) We find that this question of reasonableness is properly conceived of as a jury determination. Id.