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Defendant's Attorney: Richard W. Osman and Sheila D. Crawford

Description: San Francisco, California civil rights lawyers represented Plaintiff, who sued Defendant on a 1983 excessive force theory.

The district court held that Lemos’s claim was barred by
Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477 (1994), because Lemos
was convicted of willfully resisting, delaying, or obstructing
the deputy during the same interaction in violation of Cal.
Penal Code section 148(a)(1).

The preclusion doctrine established in Heck requires a
court to “consider whether a judgment in favor of the
plaintiff would necessarily imply the invalidity of his
conviction or sentence; if it would, the complaint must be
dismissed unless the plaintiff can demonstrate that the
conviction or sentence has already been invalidated.”
512 U.S. at 487.

The en banc court held that because the record did not
show that Lemos’s section 1983 action necessarily rested on
the same event as her criminal conviction, success in the
former would not necessarily imply the invalidity of the
latter. Heck would bar Lemos from bringing an excessive-
force claim under section 1983 if that claim were based on
force used during the conduct that was the basis for her
section 148(a)(1) conviction. Crucially, the criminal jury
was told that it could find Lemos guilty based on any one of
four acts she committed during the course of her interaction
with Deputy Holton. Because the jury returned a general
verdict, it is not known which act it thought constituted an
offense. Although any of the four acts could be the basis for
the guilty verdict, Lemos’s section 1983 action was based on
an allegation that Holton used excessive force during only
the last one. The court held that if Lemos were to prevail in
her civil action, it would not necessarily mean that her
conviction was invalid; and the action was therefore not
barred by Heck.

The en banc court remanded for further proceedings.
Judge Callahan, joined by Lee, dissented, and would
affirm the district court’s application of the Heck bar to
Lemos’s § 1983 claim. She wrote that the majority’s reason
wrongfully presupposed that an uninterrupted interaction
with no temporal or spatial break between a § 1983
plaintiff’s unlawful conduct and an officer’s alleged
excessive force can be broken down into distinct isolated
events to avoid the application of the Heck bar.

Outcome:

Plaintiff's Experts:

Defendant's Experts:

Comments: