County Agrees To Pay $390,000 To Students Arrested By A Sheriff 'Just To Prove A Point'

from the MAYBE-HIRE-BETTER-PEOPLE dept

Back in September, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unshockingly decided that it's illegal to arrest schoolchildren just to "prove a point." The Fourth Amendment demands probable cause for an arrest, even an arrest of students who have (slightly) diminished Constitutional rights.

This was Deputy Luis Ortiz's solution to a problem he shouldn't even have been attempting to solve. Ortiz decided the students he was speaking to about alleged bullying weren't taking him seriously enough, so he tossed a few in squad cars and took them to the Sheriff's office. Nothing about this was legal, but the county decided to defend this all the way to the appellate level. The Ninth Circuit's assessment of Ortiz's actions was harsh but far more fair than Ortiz deserved.

Deputy Ortiz clearly stated that the justification for the arrests was not the commission of a crime, since he did not “care who is at fault,” nor the school’s special need to maintain campus safety, but rather his own desire to “prove a point” and “make” the students “mature a lot faster.” The arrest of a middle schooler, however, cannot be justified as a scare tactic, a lesson in maturity, or a chastisement for perceived disrespect.

[...]

Deputy Ortiz faced a room of seven seated, mostly quiet middle school girls, and only generalized allegations of fighting and conflict amongst them. Even accounting for what Deputy Ortiz perceived to be nonresponsiveness to his questioning, the full-scale arrests of all seven students, without further inquiry, was both excessively intrusive in light of the girls’ young ages and not reasonably related to the school’s expressed need.

It appears this loss has finally pushed the county to accept the inevitable outcome of Deputy Ortiz's unconstitutional behavior. The Daily Bulletin reports taxpayers will be paying the arrested students for Ortiz's illegal bullying.

San Bernardino County has agreed to pay nearly $400,000 to three former middle-schoolers to settle a lawsuit stemming from a 2013 arrest a federal court ruled unconstitutional.

In October 2013, a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy handcuffed, arrested and drove three seventh-grade girls from Etiwanda Intermediate School to the police station to “teach the girls a lesson.”

On Friday, Dec. 21, a lawyer for the girls announced the county has paid them $390,000 to settle their lawsuit.

This outcome was all but assured the moment Ortiz decided to start teaching students lessons by performing unconstitutional arrests. The county's decision to fight the district court's ruling doesn't reflect well on it or its legal representation. Somehow the county thought that if it just litigated hard enough, it would somehow talk a court into agreeing law enforcement can arrest people just to "teach them a lesson" -- even when those "someones" were teens who committed no crime and posed no safety threat to the school or the idiotic law enforcement officer it had hired.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, 9th circuit, arrest, luis ortiz, san bernardino county, students

FBI's Own Actions Likely Made Farook's iPhone Data Inaccessible

from the oops dept

On Friday, we noted that one of the reasons that the FBI was unable to get access to the data on the remaining iPhone from Syed Farook was because after the shooting and after the phone was in the hands of the government, Farook's employer, the San Bernardino Health Department, initiated a password change on his iCloud account. That apparently messed stuff up, because without that, it would have been possible to force the phone to backup data to the associated iCloud account, where it would have been available to the FBI. But, after we published that article, a rather salient point came out: the Health Department only did this because the FBI asked it to do so.

From a San Bernardino County Twitter account:

The County was working cooperatively with the FBI when it reset the iCloud password at the FBI's request.

— CountyWire (@CountyWire) February 20, 2016

If you can't read that, it says: "The County was working cooperatively with the FBI when it reset the iCloud password at the FBI's request."

In short: a big reason why the FBI can't get the info it wants is because of an action taken... by the FBI.

Apple has also provided further information on this, showing how it was perfectly willing to cooperate in reasonable ways with the FBI -- but that it was the FBI that messed things up:

The Apple executive told reporters that the company’s engineers had first suggested to the government that it take the phone to the suspect’s apartment to connect it to the Wi-Fi there. But since reporters and members of the public had swarmed that crime scene shortly after the shootings occurred, it was likely that any Wi-Fi there had been disconnected. So Apple suggested the government take the phone to Farook’s former workplace and connect the phone to a Wi-Fi network there.

The executive said that Apple walked the government through the entire process to accomplish this, but the government came back about two weeks later and told Apple that it hadn’t worked.

Apple didn’t understand why it had not worked—until the company learned that sometime after the phone had been taken into the custody of law enforcement, someone had gone online and changed the Apple ID that the phone uses to conduct backups.

Two interesting points in there: first, do you remember how there was all this discussion about the insane media scrum that ransacked Farook's house? And lots of people pointed out that useful evidence may have been harmed by it. At the time, the FBI insisted they were all done with the house, but it appears that may have been part of the reason why they couldn't get the backup.

The second is that Apple had not revealed this tidbit earlier. The company explained that it had felt that its conversations with the government had been confidential until the FBI revealed this detail in the totally unexpected Motion to Compel it filed Friday. It appeared that the FBI was so eager to push its PR stunt that it filed the document (which it had no reason to file), and then revealed even more of its own bungling in this particular case.

Whether intentional or not, this is only going to add support to people who say that the FBI doesn't actually care what's on the phone, but wanted to be able to go after the data in this case because they knew they could set a precedent in a case where their argument will generate the most sympathy. Remember, back in September, after the Intelligence Community lost the fight to get a law banning strong encryption, intelligence officials said out loud that they'd just wait until the next terrorist attack:

Although “the legislative environment is very hostile today,” the intelligence community’s top lawyer, Robert S. Litt, said to colleagues in an August e-mail, which was obtained by The Post, “it could turn in the event of a terrorist attack or criminal event where strong encryption can be shown to have hindered law enforcement.”

There is value, he said, in “keeping our options open for such a situation.”

Two months later, you get a "terrorist attack" (or a workplace dispute that can be painted as a terrorist attack) and a sorta, kinda encrypted phone, and voila. Just what the intel community asked for. It would be crazy to suggest that any of this was done on purpose -- it's almost certainly a bit of convenience for the intel and law enforcement communities. But the fact that the FBI directed the Health Department to change the password, and that's part of the reason they're now locked out, really raises some questions about what the FBI's priorities were here. It also raises a separate question of whether or not companies should be forced to hack their own system in cases where the FBI's own bungling was responsible for the loss of information. But, really, that's a minor point, given that the DOJ wants that power even in cases where the FBI didn't mess things up itself.

Filed Under: encryption, fbi, icloud, password reset, san bernardino county, syed farook