Gabbi Lemos v. County of Sonoma

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.