Maria Flores v. County of Los Angeles

Plaintiff Maria Flores alleges that after she received a traffic ticket, she drove to a Los Angeles County vehicle inspection site to clear the ticket. There, she alleges, she was sexually assaulted by a deputy sheriff, who is to date unidentified. She now sues the County and its sheriff Lee Baca, claiming the assault was a proximate result of their failure properly to train deputy sheriffs “to ensure that Sheriffs [djeputies do not sexually assault women that [deputies come in contact with.” This failure to train is alleged to be a violation of plaintiffs constitutional rights, actionable under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 . The district court dismissed Flores’s claims for failure to state a claim for relief, and she appeals.

Flores’s allegations do not establish that the County or Baca were deliberately indifferent to the risk of sexual assault by deputies on members of the public, nor that the assault on Flores was a known or obvious consequence of the alleged lack of training of deputies. Further, in view of the penal code of California, which already prohibited such assault, and which law the deputies were sworn to uphold, and in the absence of any pattern of sexual assaults by…