Wire
A wrongful-conviction suit against San Francisco moves ahead
The Ninth Circuit said a jury could hear claims that police used coercive tactics to get a witness to falsely identify Joaquin Ciria in a 1990 murder case.
For Joaquin Ciria, the ruling keeps open a path to account for a conviction that cost him 32 years of his life. The Ninth Circuit said the federal case against San Francisco Police Department inspectors Arthur Gerrans and James Crowley can move forward, rejecting their bid to end the lawsuit on qualified-immunity grounds.
Ciria was exonerated on April 18, 2022, after serving three decades in prison for the 1990 murder of Felix Bastarrica. He says the case against him rested on a witness statement police coerced into pointing the blame his way.
A witness statement under a microscope
The lawsuit says the inspectors used coercive and abusive tactics to get George Varela to falsely name Ciria as the shooter in exchange for immunity. Ciria’s claims include fabrication of evidence and malicious prosecution under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the federal civil-rights law people use to challenge unconstitutional police conduct.
The panel said a reasonable jury could find those tactics happened and that they crossed a constitutional line. That is enough, at this stage, to keep the case in court rather than ending it before trial.
Why 1990 still matters
The court’s answer turned on timing as much as conduct. It said the law was already clear in 1990 that coercing a fabricated statement would violate Ciria’s constitutional rights, so the officers could not claim the rule was unsettled when the murder case was built.
The ruling does not decide that the officers fabricated evidence. It does leave Ciria with a live chance to try to prove that police pressure helped send an innocent man to prison, the kind of claim that often rises or falls on whether the court will let a jury hear it.