Court Opinion

ID: 9600080
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 01:24:07.128902+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:01:49.989223
License: Public Domain

PREGERSON, Circuit Judge,
Dissenting:
I agree with District Court Judge Audrey B. Collins’s ultimate disposition of this case, Sanchez v. Bratton, No. CV 04-9991 ABC (SSX), 2006 WL 802328, at *11-14 (C.D.Cal., Mar. 14, 2006), and her conclusion that the “Plaintiffs have raised a triable issue of fact ... as to their claim of unlawful detention, and further, that the Officer Defendants are not entitled to qualified immunity on that claim.” Id. at *5.1 therefore dissent.
I am also troubled by how law enforcement officers carelessly executed the warrantless probation search of the Sanchez residence. The warrantless search took place around 6 a.m. on December 5, 2003, when the Sanchez family was awakened by eight officers pounding at their door. Oscar Sanchez, the object of the search, was not at home, and Oscar’s mother, Eva, repeatedly told the officers that Oscar was in prison. But not a single officer, nor their leader, made any attempt to verify whether this information was correct. Instead, the officers ordered the family,1 clad *1176only in their night clothes, to go outside where they stood in the cold,2 dark3 morning for forty-five minutes4 while the officers searched them home looking for Oscar.
But as Oscar Sanchez’s mother repeatedly told the officers, Oscar was behind bars at California’s Tehachapi Correctional Institution. In fact, he had been in prison during the preceding ten months, since February 2003. Yet the record fails to show that any law enforcement officer ever tried to call Oscar’s probation officer to verify his whereabouts. Nor did any law enforcement officer run a current rap sheet on Oscar. Nor did any officer bother to call California prison authorities or the Department of Corrections’s inmate locator hotline to determine whether Oscar was in state prison, even though an officer did check Los Angeles County Jail records to no avail. Such an egregious failure of due diligence on the part of law enforcement to the detriment of innocent parties should not be condoned. Additional investigation would have taken only minutes, and would have spared the Sanchez family the anxiety of being ordered to stand in their yard, in their night clothes, in the dark, and in the cold, under the curious eyes of neighbors for forty-five minutes while the officers searched their home for Oscar.
I would, therefore, affirm the district court’s decision to deny summary judgment to the officers based on qualified immunity on the Sanchez family’s 42 U.S.C. § 1983 unlawful detention claim. Accordingly, I dissent.

. The officers permitted Carmen, Oscar's grandmother who was recovering from cancer surgery, to remain inside the house on a couch.

. Eva Sanchez, Oscar’s mother, noted in her deposition that when she stepped outside her home on December 5, 2003, ”[i]t was cold.” Furthermore, according to the charts of the National Climatic Data Center, the outside temperature in Los Angeles was 49 degrees Fahrenheit at 5:47 a.m. on December 5, 2003, and 50 degrees at 6:47 a.m. See National Climatic Data Center, Los Angeles: Downtown L.A./USC Campus, Unedited Local Climatological Data Hourly Observations Table, http://cdo.ncdc.noaa.gov/ulcdAJLCD (last visited June 16, 2009). I take judicial notice of these facts. See Fed.R.Evid. 201.

. According to the charts calculated by the United States Naval Observatory, the sun rose in Los Angeles on December 5, 2003 at 6:44 a.m. See U.S. Naval Observatory, http://aa. usno.navy.mil/data/docs/RS_OneDay.php (last visited June 16, 2009). I take judicial notice of this fact. See Fed.R.Evid. 201. Because the officers began their search around 6 a.m. and the Sanchez family waited for forty-five minutes outside their home during the search, the family spent much of that time in the dark.

. There is some ambiguity regarding how long the Sanchez family was detained outside their home. Because we are considering Defendants’ summary judgment motion on the issue of qualified immunity, we must view the facts in the light most favorable to the party asserting the injury. See Saucier v. Katz, 533 U.S. 194, 201, 121 S.Ct. 2151, 150 L.Ed.2d 272 (2001). Accordingly, we assume that the detention lasted forty-five minutes, the longest duration asserted by Eva Sanchez.