Matrice Anderson v. City of Los Angeles

FILED

NOT FOR PUBLICATION JAN 28 2013

MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS U .S. C O U R T OF APPE ALS

FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

MATRICE L. ANDERSON, No. 09-56442

Plaintiff - Appellant, D.C. No. 2:07-cv-05612-SVW-RC

v.

MEMORANDUM *

CITY OF LOS ANGELES, public entity; WILLIAM BRATTON, Officer, individually; LOPEZ, Officer #36320, Erroneously Sued As Jose G. Lopez; R. BROWN, Officer #25781; HICK, Officer #35401,

Defendants - Appellees.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Central District of California Stephen V. Wilson, District Judge, Presiding

Argued and Submitted December 3, 2012 Pasadena, California

Before: WARDLAW, BEA, and N.R. SMITH, Circuit Judges.

* This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent except as provided by 9th Cir. R. 36-3. Matrice Anderson was detained by two Los Angeles police officers after a

911 caller reported a disturbance at a grocery store and a security guard identified

Anderson’s car as containing the suspect. Anderson sued the officers and the city

under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for violating her…

*579 MEMORANDUM *

Matrice Anderson was detained by two Los Angeles police officers after a 911 caller reported a disturbance at a grocery store and a security guard identified Anderson’s car as containing the suspect. Anderson sued the officers and the city under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for violating her Fourth Amendment rights through unlawful detention, false arrest, and use of excessive force. Anderson appeals from an adverse judgment following the jury verdict for defendants and the district court’s denial of her motion for new trial. We have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291 , and we affirm.

In making this determination, we assume that Anderson was entitled to a jury instruction on the law of unlawful arrest and probable cause, and that the district court erred in denying her request. See Clem v. Lomeli, 566 F.3d 1177, 1181 (9th Cir.2009). However, this error was harmless in light of the jury instructions that the district court did give, which accurately stated the law governing whether the investigatory stop was permissible. See Allen v. City of Portland, 73 F.3d 232, 235 (9th Cir.1995); Washington v. Lambert, 98 F.3d 1181, 1185 (9th Cir.1996). The jury concluded that the…

dissenting in part:

The majority holds that it was harmless error for the district court to completely exclude from the jury’s consideration an entire claim about which conflicting evidence was adduced at trial, based on the district judge’s professed subjective belief that he did not “think an arrest ever occurred.” Although Anderson alleged in her complaint that she was unlawfully arrested and presented evidence at trial in support of that allegation, and even though the defendants never moved for summary judgment or judgment as a matter of law, the district court ruled on the record that it would not “allow that question to be presented to the jury.” After Anderson *580 moved for a new trial, the district court did an abrupt about-face, concluding for the first time in a post-trial order that its instructions to the jury had been sufficient to encompass the unlawful arrest claim after all. Because the majority’s acquiescence to this post-hoc rationalization is contrary to our law, I respectfully dissent from this aspect of the disposition.

The majority reasons that because the jury found the stop to be reasonable as an investigatory stop requiring only reasonable suspicion,…