A former Alexander police officer's federal civil-rights lawsuit, filed in 2012 against former Police Chief Horace Walters, alleges enough legitimate, factual disputes that it should be decided by a jury, a federal appeals court said Monday.
The panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis affirmed a pre-trial ruling in which U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker refused to toss the case against Walters on the grounds that, as an official, he was entitled to qualified immunity.
The case filed by former officer Brad Williams has been on hold for months while Walters appealed Baker's decision.
"There was bad blood between Williams and Walters, stemming from Williams' support of the mayor," according to the opinion of the panel -- U.S. circuit judges Roger Wollman of Sioux Falls, S.D., and James B. Loken and Diana Murphy, both of Minneapolis. The opinion noted that in the summer of 2011, Walters told Williams that the mayor and his supporters were "a bunch of cockroaches," that "the gloves were coming off," and that Walters was "an atomic bomb and he was going to destroy" Williams.
The comments led Paul Mitchell, then the mayor, to fire Walters, who was promptly reinstated by the City Council.
A few months later, a city bookkeeper discovered that Williams had cashed two payroll checks covering the same pay period, and brought it to his attention at a City Council meeting. Williams had misplaced the first check in 2010, causing the city to issue him a replacement check, but Williams found the check a year later and cashed it, saying he didn't realize it was the lost check, according to the opinion.
It noted that although the mayor found that Williams had made "an error that was not intentional" and Williams returned the money to the city two days later, Walters later included the situation in a sworn affidavit he wrote alleging probable cause for Williams' arrest. The affidavit led a federal magistrate judge to issue a warrant for Williams' arrest on a misdemeanor theft charge.
The affidavit also included allegations that Williams had stolen a set of blue lights that he said he had borrowed from another officer who actually owned the lights.
Williams was arrested on the warrant and spent a day in jail until the prosecuting attorney threw out the case. Williams then sued Walters, alleging violations of his rights under the First and Fourth amendments.
In upholding Baker's decision to dismiss the city as a defendant but allow the case to proceed against Walters, the 8th Circuit panel noted that qualified immunity protects government officials from civil liability unless the facts, viewed in the light most favorable to the plaintiff, demonstrate the deprivation of a clearly established constitutional or statutory right.
Metro on 12/09/2014