Devereaux

Opinion by Judge MILLLER; Dissent by Judge KLEINFELD

In this case, Plaintiff Robert Devereaux (“Devereaux”) appeals the district court’s grant of summary judgment for defendants in a civil rights suit. Devereaux brought suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 claiming that his Fourteenth Amendment rights were violated by various governmental entities and employees during a child sexual molestation investigation. We affirm the district court’s grant of summary judgment against all defendants.

FACTS

The issue in this case is whether one of the victims of the Wenatchee, Washington “sex ring” prosecutions established a genuine issue of material fact entitling him to a jury trial against a defense of qualified immunity. Because this is an appeal from a summary judgment, we view the evidence in the light most favorable to Dever-eaux, the non-moving party.

From 1987 to 1990, Devereaux and his former wife were licensed foster parents caring for young girls. Following a 1990 divorce, Devereaux managed the foster home alone, and thereby encountered difficulties with several Department of Health and Human Services (“DSHS”) and Child Protective Services (“CPS”) employees, who “questioned the…

dissenting:

I respectfully dissent.

Devereaux presented solid evidence that the defendants actively coerced witnesses to tell lies that would subject him to punishment for crimes he did not commit. For that wrong, there can be no immunity. Any government official should know that a person has a constitutional right not to be “framed.”

There was only one witness, Linda Miller, who said from the beginning and stuck to her story that Devereaux sexually abused children. Any reasonable person in the investigators’ position would have known better than to believe her. 1 She described frequent sex orgies lasting most of the night involving Devereaux, a man in his late 50’s, and many other adults with many children, involving so many dozens of acts of sexual intercourse by these people that in all likelihood staying awake so long and performing the acts would be physically impossible. The defendants had to know to a certainty that Miller’s story was false after they obtained a medical examination of Miller’s daughter. Miller had said that in the orgies, dozens of adult men engaged in sexual intercourse with her daughter. Yet her daughter turned out to have an intact hymen, so her…