Professor wins civil suit against city
Five years after the measures were found to be illegal, the Los Angeles Police Department continued to enforce curfew provisions in gang injunctions that criminalized being outside at night for suspected gang members.
However, through the persistence of Christian Rodriguez and Alberto Cazarez, both formerly charged with violating the curfew, and their attorney Olu Orange, an assistant adjunct professor of political science at USC, the city of Los Angeles will now be forced to pay up to $30 million to assist thousands of people affected by unlawful curfew orders. This settlement is the result of a 2011 federal class-action lawsuit filed by Orange, contending that the LAPD had been willfully ignoring a California appeals court ruling that had declared the curfews “unconstitutionally vague” four years prior.
“Gang injunctions, in how they’re drafted and implemented in Los Angeles and in the cities that follow Los Angeles’ lead, are all designed to infringe upon very basic fundamental, constitutionally protected freedoms — the freedom to associate, the freedom to speak or express oneself, the freedom to move and travel freely,” Orange said. “I also believe that they are a tool that law enforcement uses with unfettered discretion to engage in very lazy and inaccurate police work.”
The settlement, which is pending approval by a federal court judge, will primarily be used to fund job training and apprenticeship programs for the roughly 5,600 people included in the lawsuit, as well as tattoo removal for those seeking to leave gangs. Additional funds will also be paid toward the education of the daughters of the two plaintiffs.
Orange, who is also a civil rights lawyer and a panel attorney for the Indigent Criminal Defense Program, originally became involved with the case after being appointed as Rodriguez’s attorney. Rodriguez was arrested in 2009 for violating curfew. Though he has no ties to any gang, he was included in the injunction because of his brother’s gang connections and Cazarez was arrested for associating with him. As a juvenile, Cazarez was released, but it wasn’t until 2011 that Orange succeeded in getting charges dropped against Rodriguez.
After that experience, Rodriguez and Cazarez wanted to ensure that the city could not continue to enforce curfews against anyone, Orange said.
To assist him in gathering evidence for the class-action lawsuit, Orange credited the support of his then-intern, MiRi Song ‘09, as well as six then-Dornsife undergraduates, Sarah Ayad ‘12, Mitchell Diesko ‘15, Min Ji Gal ‘13, Lauren Ige ‘12, Angel Lopez ‘12 and Arpine Sardaryan ‘12.
Together, Orange and Song determined that more gang injunctions than just the one in Rodriguez’s case contained unconstitutional language. She helped review the terminology of all the gang injunctions in L.A. to figure out which ones could be challenged using the 2007 ruling. His students then analyzed tens of thousands of pages of police reports to determine the plaintiffs who should be included in the lawsuit.
Gal, who graduated from the Gould School of Law this year, reflected on what this case taught her about societal change through the legal system.
“Justice is slow. This case started in 2011 — that’s when I first started — and I’ve seen it progress, since it’s gotten class-action certification, since it went through different stages. One of the named plaintiffs [Cazarez] passed away,” Gal said. “It’s a very long process, and sometimes it might be too slow, but in the end, the system works. So you can have confidence in that.”
Orange too found significance in the case, hoping it would both discourage unconstitutional tactics concerning gang injunctions as well as prove beneficial through the funded job training and apprenticeship programs.
“Folks actually want to live good lives, and I hope this case provides an opportunity for that,” Orange said.
The amount that the city will pay — at minimum $4.5 million — depends on the number of people who will claim benefits. All of the plaintiffs so far have been enthusiastic about the program, Orange said.
“The uniform response is, ‘If this case had yielded thousands of dollars for me, I would spend it and it would be gone,” he said. “But this case gives me an opportunity to actually gain job training, create a job history, engage in education that will support a career, giving us an opportunity to change our lives for the better, and that’s far more important than some sum of money.”
As for the lesson he hopes this case will teach his students about the law, Orange cited a quote by prominent civil rights lawyer, Charles Houston, to describe the role of lawyers in creating societal change.
“‘A lawyer is either a social engineer or a parasite on society,’” Orange said. “You have a responsibility to make society better for people.”
This is a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Clearly there are some problems with the way the curfew laws were drafted, and it is shameful that people who were not specifically in gangs were caught up in these gang injunctions… But this successful effort to eliminate these laws entirely is almost as shameful. Gangs are nothing short of a cancer on society. They serve no good. Rather, they serve to corrupt, destroy, demean, intimidate and kill. Their behaviour is criminal. Their influence is pervasive, and extends even to those who may not specifically be members of a gang, but associate with gang members and gang culture in a variety of nefarious ways. Though I am not familiar with the specifics of this case, nor the individuals arrested under the curfew laws, let’s not pretend that they are all automatically “innocent” simply because they were not gang members. Again, the cancer of gang influence and activity has weaved itself into many aspects of our culture.
A final note: We often criticize juries for decisions we feel are wrong, but don’t assume that decisions by judges are any better. Judges are and should be held to a very high standard, but they are human, and subject to the same biases as anyone else. Let’s not forget that federal judge who years ago decided that illegal immigrants should nevertheless be entitled to in-state tuition rates… Or the California Supreme Court justices who decided an illegal immigrant who “otherwise” had satisfied all bar requirements should be entitled to practice law (of all things) in California. These two examples should be enough to spark nothing short of outrage among Californians, but for those needing more, there is the current case of a northern California judge who sentenced an ex-Stanford student to only 6 months in jail following his conviction for rape.
So again, the judges who found the gang injunction and curfew laws to be “constitutionally vague” should be questioned in the first place. I’m not entirely sure what the answer is here, but surely there is a way to achieve justice for plaintiff’s who were incorrectly arrested under these laws without completely destroying laws that are a critical component in our important effort to shut down gangs.