Los Angeles Immune From Damages Caused by Arresting Woman With Similar Name to Suspect
Earlier this month, the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the City of Los Angeles is immune from liability for actions by the Los Angeles Police Department that sent an innocent woman to jail for 12 days because a Texas grand jury made an error when it indicted her instead of another woman with an almost identical name. Bethany Kaley Farber (Kaley) is not Bethany Gill Farber (Gill), but despite major differences in their descriptions, Kaley will receive no damages for the error made by the Texas grand jury, and relied on by the LAPD, for her mistaken arrest and jail time.
Both parties will be referred to by their middle names in this article to make it easier to follow the events that took place between the day of Kaley’s arrest in 2021 and the Ninth Circuit’s decision on August 6, 2024.
Kaley was arrested as a fugitive and detained in jail for 12 days while she was at Los Angeles International Airport on her way to Mexico. The officers from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) mistakenly arrested her, thinking she was the subject of a no-bail warrant issued by a grand jury in Texas. The officers wrongly thought she was Gill, the actual subject of the Texas warrant for vandalism. The error was initially the fault of the Texas grand jury, which mistakenly issued its warrant for Kaley.
The LAPD, therefore, conducted the arrest based on the Texas warrant which included not only Kaley’s name but also her physical description. That description matched Kaley’s information in a criminal database that had her full name, date of birth, address, driver’s license number and physical description. In fact, Kaley was younger and had “long, blond hair,” while Gill was older and had short brown hair, but that is not what the Texas warrant said.
Kaley spent twelve days in Lynwood Women’s Jail before the Texas court informed the Los Angeles County Superior Court that she had been incorrectly identified as a suspect. She was released later that day and subsequently sued the City of Los Angeles and 100 other anonymous defendants for damages under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, which entitles plaintiffs to recover compensation for “all injuries suffered as consequences of violation of their constitutional rights.” To prevail under this section, the act must have been committed by persons acting under color of state law and it must have resulted in the deprivation of a constitutional right.
Kaley also claimed her Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of due process was violated because “an arrest is considered a seizure under the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unlawful seizure” and her Fourteenth Amendment rights were breached because she did not receive due process. She claimed that the detention not only damaged her but her grandmother as well, who “suffered a “stress-induced stroke” and died while Kaley was in custody.
Kaley’s case came before Presiding District Judge Otis D. Wright II of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. He granted summary judgment in favor of the City of Los Angeles on all of Kaley’s claims, saying “an arrest is considered a seizure under the Fourth Amendment and is reasonable when supported by probable cause…The Warrant listed (Kaley) Farber’s exact identifying information down to the detail and did not deviate one inch or pound. Thus…the arresting officers were not unreasonable in believing that (Kaley) was the true warrant subject at the time of her arrest.”
Judge Wright dismissed Kaley’s Fourteenth Amendment due process claims for the same reason and rejected her Fourth Amendment claims that alleged the arresting officers “did not follow protocol because the police who arrested her had not attended ‘supervisor school’ before offering booking advice.” Otis rejected this as well because LAPD policy “does not establish constitutional rights.” He concluded that Los Angeles is immune from civil liability stemming from mistaken arrest and detention. In addition, there was no “factual question” about the officer’s reasonable belief that Kaley was the subject of the warrant. Therefore, both the officers and the City of Los Angeles were immune from suit.
Kaley appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal where an unpublished opinion authored by Circuit Judges Morgan Christen and Lawrence VanDyke and Senior Circuit Judge William A. Fletcher affirmed Wright’s judgment on August 6. Their Memorandum said, “…the undisputed evidence shows Farber was arrested and detained because she was mistakenly indicted in Texas.” All her other claims were also rejected because she first raised them in her reply brief and, even if they were raised earlier, they were without merit.
The opinion next discussed Kaley’s constitutional issues. The Ninth Circuit decided that her arrest did not violate the Fourth Amendment because the LAPD officers “had a good faith, reasonable belief that was the subject of the warrant.” The Texas court had issued a warrant for her arrest and all the information that identified her was identical to the descriptors in the warrant. The fact that Kaley proclaimed her innocence “did not make the officers’ beliefs unreasonable.” The same reasoning held true for her Fourteenth Amendment arguments.
Although it turned out that an innocent woman en route to Mexico was arrested, the Ninth Circuit had no sympathy for her. The Circuit Court affirmed the district court because they saw no error when it gave immunity to Los Angeles under California law. The LAPD members who arrested her at the airport “reasonably believed she was a fugitive from a valid warrant, and the police officers who arrested her were “entitled to rely on process and orders valid on their face.”
Since the actual cause of her arrest was the errors made by Texas, perhaps she will pursue her claims in a different forum now that Los Angeles and the LAPD have been given immunity. Perhaps Kaley will have a chance at justice in another state whose error kept her in jail for 12 days and may have contributed to the death of her grandmother.
