Santa Ana, California Police Misconduct Attorney

SANTA ANA, CALIFORNIA POLICE MISCONDUCT ATTORNEY

DON’T GET FRAMED, GET PAID FOR YOUR POLICE BEATING, FALSE ARREST AND MALICIOUS PROSECUTION.

Mr. Steering’s law practice serves OC County and other locations throughout California. Mr. Steering is also licensed to practice law in the State of Georgia and has practiced in federal courts outside of California pro hac vice,  including the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Mr. Steering is also a Members of the Bars of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals and the United States Supreme Court (since 1987).

The majority of Mr. Steering’s firm’s law practice is defending bogus “contempt of cop” criminal actions, usually followed by Mr. Steering filing and prosecuting lawsuits against the very same police officers who beat-up, falsely arrested and falsely accused the innocent of criminal conduct, to protect themselves and their employing agency from liability to the innocent for their outrages.

FREE CASE EVALUATION

Most of Mr. Steering’s criminal and civil cases involve core Bill of Rights type issues; the difference between living in a free society of a police state. Most of these federal civil rights cases involve police violation of person(s) fourth amendment rights (i.e unreasonable searches of persons and their places and effects, and unreasonable seizures of person (false arrest and unreasonable force, procuring bogus and malicious criminal prosecutions) and first amendment violations (retaliation for protected speech and to petition for redress and various other “Constitutional Torts” , including police whistleblowing cases (Cal. Labor Code Section 1102.5.)

POLICE MISCONDUCT IN SANTA ANA, CALIFORNIA.

Santa Ana has always been a hotbed of police misconduct.

As far back as 1990, Mr. Steering won a $612,000.00 jury verdict (plus attorney’s fees) against a sole Santa

Ana Police Department police officer for unreasonable force; Farahani v. City of Santa Ana, U.S. District Court (Santa Ana)(See, “Police Brutality False Arrest Case Results” pages for verdicts / settlements / judgments against other police agencies.) See also, City to Pay $292,500 to Man Who Says Officer Beat Him : Litigation: Attorneys reach settlement after city’s appeal of a federal jury award of more than $600,000, Los Angeles Times, September 17, 1991.

In more recent times the Santa Ana Police Department forced out its Chief of Police for exposing corruption of Santa Ana City officials as well as for  trying to steer the department “away from corruption” and cracked down on poor officer behavior, including on some who were “improperly accounting for their time.”.

See, Ex-Santa Ana police chief sues city alleging he was forced out for whistle-blowin, OC Register, October 3, 2017. Like other OC police Chiefs who try to reform the behavior of his/her subordinate Officers to conform to constitutional standards, the police associations in those departments is having none of it. See, Huntington Beach police union asks for Chief Robert Handy’s removal after no confidence vote, OC Register, August 16, 2017.

Mr. Steering is an expert in defending your bogus criminal action, in a way to best protect and enhance your ability to ultimately obtain some justice; reasonable compensation and redress, for your police beating; for your false arrest; for your unlawful search and seizure; for your malicious criminal prosecution; and for what’s usually at the center of all of the above, the exercise of our right to freedom of speech, and to complain to public officers, about misconduct by them or others, under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution..

Gomez v. County of Orange, et al., U.S. Dist. Court, Central District of California

(LA) (2011) ($2,100,000.00)

Torrance v. County of Orange, et al., U.S. District Court, Central District of California (Santa Ana)(2010); obtained $380,000.00 for unreasonable force and false arrest;

Chamberlain v. County of Orange et al., U.S. District Court, Central District of California (Santa Ana)(2009); obtained $600,000.00 for failure to protect pre-trial detainee in OC Jail;

Baima v. County of Orange, et al; U.S. District Court, Central District of California (Santa Ana)(2003); obtained $208,000.00 for false arrest / unreasonable force.

Celli v. County of Orange, et al; U.S. District Court, Central District of California (Santa Ana)(2009); obtained $200,000.00 for false arrest / unreasonable force.

Farahani v. City of Santa Ana; Mr. Steering obtained a $612,000.00 jury verdict against a Santa Ana Police Department officer for unreasonable force, for a single baton strike to a young man’s head. Farahani v. City of Santa Ana; United States District Court, Central District of California.

SANTA ANA POLICE ARE NOT THERE TO PROTECT YOU; HEADS THEY WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE; POLICE PROSECUTION OF POLICE MISCONDUCT VICTIMS GIVES THE POLICE TWO BITES AT THE APPLE.

The police are not technically a “party” to your bogus criminal proceeding; “The State” or “The People of the State” is the other party. Because “issue preclusion” or “claim preclusion”  generally requires a person sought to be bound by a prior judicial determination to have been a party to the prior proceeding and had the opportunity to fully and fairly litigate that issue, even if you somehow avoid being framed and are acquitted, that the finding of your innocence (“not guilty verdict”) is not binding on the police in a subsequent civil rights action against the same officers who tried to frame you.

However, if you had been convicted, since you were a party to the prior judicial action (the defendants), the issue of your guilt and all of the legal consequence flowing therefrom (i.e. basically can’t sue any more) have already and permanently been determined against you. So, for example, if a police officer unlawfully “seized” you cannot sue for your false arrest; not because your conviction adjudicated those issues of fact that go into the formulation of whether your arrest was lawful (i.e. whether the police had either a warrant or probable/reasonable cause to believe that you committed a crime); only because the Conservative Wing of the Supreme Court took it upon themselves to make-up a rule, a “policy decision”, that prohibits guilty people from being able to obtain damages for their truly false arrest. See, Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477 (1994).

If the prosecution is able to convict you for a “resistance offense” (i.e. resisting / obstructing / delaying peace officer, battery on a peace officer, preventing public officer from performing a duty of his/her office), there has been a similar judicial determination that the police necessarily were acting lawfully. Accordingly, as one of the elements of these resistance offenses is that the peace officer was engaged in the lawful performance of his/her duties, and the jury must have found that to be so, generally you are also now precluded from suing for the use of unreasonable force upon you, or even that the police unlawfully searched you or your property; via the Heck bar (i.e. that you were convicted, and, therefore, can’t now successfully sue the police) and via the Doctrine of “Collateral Estoppel”. In other words, since there has now been a judicial determination that the officer was in the right, and that you were not, you lose in any subsequent lawsuit against the police. All police officers know this.

If somehow you don’t get convicted (of crime that you didn’t commit), the agency still backs them all of the way. It doesn’t matter whether the police agency knows that the officer violated the law and your rights. All that they’re concerned with is protecting the officer and the police agency; that’s it; even if (and especially) if their officer severely injured or actually murdered an innocent.

All the police merely have do is to create a bogus police report that accuses you of some “resistance offense”, and send it off to the District Attorney’s Office to procure your bogus criminal prosecution. If you believe that you live in a “free country”, you’re wrong. In the practical sense of the word, you really do live in a police state.” The police really can do what they want to do with you. They can point a gun at you, prone you out on the ground and handcuff you at their whim, without any repercussions. The police can also really murder anyone anytime that they want to, just by claiming that the unarmed decedent was reaching for his waistband. This is no joke. This too, is normal.

The Law Office Of Jerry L. Steering understands these dynamics of the government prosecuting the victims of government abuse, and understands how to deal with these cases in both state court criminal proceedings and federal court civil rights actions.

PUBLICATIONS.

Mr. Steering is also a published legal scholar, and has a published Law Review Article about a logical quandary of federal evidentiary law: the disparity in the use of “accomplice accusations” between Fourth Amendment (accomplice accusations sufficiently reliable to establish probable cause for the issuance of a search warrant), and Sixth Amendmentanalysis (accomplice accusations are so inherently unreliable, that Congress could not have meant to have included them with the ambit of the Declaration Against Penal Interest exception to the hearsay rule.) See, “The Application Of Sixth Amendment Tests For The Reliability Of Hearsay Evidence To Probable Cause Determinations, 16 Rutgers Law Journal 869 (1985.)

If you want to know what do to if you’ve been falsely arrested, retaliated against for exercise of your constitutional rights, beaten-up by the police or maliciously prosecuted, please contact us. Thank you for visiting with us, and best of luck. Even if you have a legal question that’s important to you, and you just need lawyer input, we’ll be glad to answer your questions.

Thank you again for visiting with us.

Jerry L. Steering, Esq.

What to Do If You Have Been Falsely Arrested or Beaten-up by the Police – Click Here

Jerry L. Steering with Diane Sawyer,  Co-counsel* Bob Dole,
and former partner** Melvin M. Belli