Siding with the result of a Ninth Circuit decision and other federal cases over one of its own earlier opinions, a 6-1 Supreme Court in Los Angeles Police Protective League v. City of Los Angeles today finds unconstitutional California legislation requiring written complaints of police misconduct to be accompanied by signed acknowledgements that filing a knowingly false complaint can lead to a misdemeanor prosecution. The court concludes the criminal provision and the warning requirement violate free speech rights.
The majority opinion by Justice Joshua Groban doesn’t formally overrule its previous decision, People v. Stanistreet (2002) 29 Cal.4th 497, but it does the equivalent, concluding that subsequent “additional guidance” from the U.S. Supreme Court “compels us to reconsider” and “revisit” Stanistreet and the court does “part ways with Stanistreet.” It then holds that provisions in the statute — Penal Code section 148.6(a) — “exhibit numerous characteristics that, considered together, sufficiently burden a protected form of speech — namely, truthful (or at least well-intentioned) complaints of police misconduct — so as to warrant heightened constitutional scrutiny” and that those provisions “ ‘threaten censorship of ideas’ [citation] by deterring citizens from filing truthful (or at least not knowingly false) complaints of police misconduct.”
The court doesn’t decide whether strict or intermediate scrutiny of the law is appropriate because it finds section 148.6 doesn’t survive intermediate scrutiny. Under that standard of review, the court says, “while the Legislature had a legitimate and significant interest in remedying the harmful effects of abusive false claims of police misconduct, section 148.6(a) is not narrowly tailored to meet those objectives.”
Justice Goodwin Liu is the lone dissenter, saying “the Legislature’s sensible effort to protect the complaint process from intentional abuse” doesn’t violate the First Amendment because it “targets unprotected speech and has not been shown to pose a substantial risk of suppressing protected speech.” “Section 148.6 is no more unconstitutional than laws that make it a crime to commit perjury, file a false police report, submit a false document to a public agency, or lie to a government official concerning an official matter,” he writes. “Such laws ‘protect the integrity of [g]overnment processes, quite apart from merely restricting false speech.’ ” He argues that “our men and women in uniform have a hard enough job without having to deal with knowingly false allegations of misconduct.”
The majority opinion spends 15 of its 76 pages, and an additional long footnote, specifically responding to Justice Liu’s 20-page dissent.
The court reverses a published opinion of the Second District, Division Seven, Court of Appeal, which felt itself bound to follow the Supreme Court’s Stanistreet decision instead of the Ninth Circuit’s contrary opinion in Chaker v. Crogan (9th Cir. 2005) 428 F.3d 1215. Division Seven said that, given the disagreement between the two courts, the decision whether to enforce section 148.6 left the defendant City “caught between the Scylla of Chaker and the Charybdis of Stanistreet.”
More about the Police Protective League case here, here, and here.
