Melendres v. Arpaio, No. 13-16285 (9th Cir. 2015)
Annotate this CasePlaintiffs brought a class action for declaratory and injunctive relief against Sheriff Joseph Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, alleging that Defendants have a custom, policy and practice of racially profiling Latino drivers and passengers and of stopping them pretextually under the auspices of enforcing immigration-related laws. After a bench trial, the district court concluded that Defendants employed unconstitutional policies in relation to patrol operations and entered a permanent injunction against Defendants. The Ninth Circuit affirmed in part and vacated in part the permanent injunction, holding (1) Maricopa County, rather than the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, should have been named as the party in the action; (2) sufficient evidence supported the court’s finding that Defendants’ constitutional violations occurred during regular, non-saturation patrols; (3) the named plaintiffs had standing to assert the claims of absent class members who were stopped during non-saturation patrols; and (4) while many of the provisions of the injunction were narrowly tailored to remedy the specific constitutional violations found by the district court, some terms of the injunction were broader than necessary to cure the constitutional violations at issue in this case. Remanded.
Court Description: Civil Rights. The panel affirmed in part and vacated in part the district court’s permanent injunction and remanded in an action against Sheriff Joseph M. Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office alleging that defendants have a custom, policy and practice of racially profiling Latino drivers and passengers, and of stopping them pretextually under the auspices of enforcing federal and state immigration-related laws. The panel first held that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, a non-jural entity under Arizona state law, improperly MELENDRES V. ARPAIO 3 was named as a party in the action. The panel ordered that Maricopa County be substituted as a party in lieu of the Sheriff’s Office and also that on remand, the district court may consider dismissal of Sheriff Arpaio in his official capacity because an official-capacity suit is, in all respects other than name, to be treated as a suit against the entity. Addressing the defendants’ sufficiency of the evidence argument, the panel held the district court did not clearly err in finding that defendants’ unconstitutional policies extended beyond the saturation patrol context. Moreover, the panel held that the district court did not err in holding that the named plaintiffs had standing to assert the claims of absent class members who were stopped during non-saturation patrols. For the same reasons, the panel held that there was no error in the district court’s class certification order. The panel held that the injunction was not overbroad simply because it included non-saturation patrols. The panel further upheld specific provisions of the injunction pertaining to corrective training and supervision procedures and provisions requiring specific data collection and video- recording of traffic stops. The panel additionally held that most of the provisions dealing with the scope of the appointed Monitor’s assessment authority were narrowly tailored to remedying the specific constitutional violations. The panel held that the provisions of the injunction which broadly require the appointed Monitor to consider the internal investigations and reports of officer misconduct created a problem to the extent that such internal investigations and reports were unrelated to the constitutional violations found by the district court. The panel held that these provisions were not narrowly tailored to addressing the relevant 4 MELENDRES V. ARPAIO violations of federal law. The panel therefore vacated those particular provisions and ordered the district court to tailor them so as to address only the constitutional violations at issue in this case.
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