Parker v. County of Riverside

Parker v. County of Riverside

What’s at Stake

Preserving municipal liability for systemic prosecutorial misconduct under Section 1983 and Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658 (1978), in the Ninth Circuit.

Summary

Roger Wayne Parker languished in jail for nearly four years for a murder the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office knew he did not commit. During that time, line prosecutors (the frontline prosecutors working directly on criminal charges) tried and failed to convince their supervisor to dismiss the charges against Mr. Parker because he was obviously innocent.

The first line prosecutor on the case expressed serious doubts about the confession extracted from Mr. Parker, a developmentally delayed man, after a fifteen-hour interrogation. Because physical evidence (including DNA) also indicated Mr. Parker was innocent, she tried to dismiss the case. Instead, her supervisor reassigned Mr. Parker’s case to a different line prosecutor. Two years later, that same supervisor instructed the next line prosecutor not to disclose Mr. Parker’s roommate’s recorded confession of the murder, and then waited six months before moving to dismiss the charges against Mr. Parker. When this prosecutor resisted the instruction to violate their constitutional duty to disclose evidence, they were also reassigned. This was in keeping with the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office’s documented history of pursuing convictions unscrupulously, including withholding evidence.

Mr. Parker did not learn about his roommate’s confession until six years after his release. He then brought a civil rights lawsuit against both individual prosecutors and the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office. Public Justice, along with the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, and the National Police Accountability Project, filed an amicus brief supporting Mr. Parker’s appeal in the Ninth Circuit.

Core Legal Problem

In our brief, we argue that Mr. Parker’s case is a core example of why municipal liability exists under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 exists: to guard constitutional rights against systemic failures in government administration, particularly where injured plaintiffs like Mr. Parker might have no recourse against the individuals who contributed to their harm. The brief provides further evidence of the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office’s longstanding pattern or practice of tolerating and even encouraging prosecutorial misconduct, including the suppression of exculpatory evidence. The brief also explains why allowing the district court’s decision dismissing Mr. Parker’s claims to stand would render Section 1983 meaningless for plaintiffs been harmed by systemic prosecutorial misconduct and would be inconsistent with the purposes of both Section 1983 and municipal liability under Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658 (1978).