Suit against Pittsburg police for man’s death OKd by court
A federal appeals court on Thursday allowed the family of a Pittsburg man to sue the city and its police over a fatal struggle in which an officer choked the man and two officers knelt on his back until he lost consciousness.
Humberto Martinez, 32, was driving in a residential neighborhood in July 2016 when police tried to pull him over for an expired registration. He left the car and ran into a home, where officers shot him with a stun gun, then pulled him to the floor. Police said Martinez punched and kicked them and tried to run away, but they threw him back down and beat him, and one officer applied what he described as a carotid hold or a choke hold.
More police arrived, and the officer who was choking Martinez said he stopped after they rolled Martinez over on his stomach. But two officers kept their knees on his back for a period they estimated at 30 seconds, though lawyers for his family said it was closer to two minutes.
After Martinez lost consciousness, the officers tried to revive him, then took him to a hospital, where he died within an hour. The Contra Costa County coroner’s office said the cause of death was asphyxiation, that Martinez’s airways had been obstructed for four to six minutes, and that he had also suffered 16 broken ribs and other fractures.
Lawyers for the city argued that the officers had acted reasonably. But U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of San Francisco ruled in March 2019 that the family could go to trial with claims of excessive force against the officers and inadequate training by the city.
“A factfinder could reasonably conclude based on Martinez’s level of resistance, the rather minor nature of the underlying offense, and the overall circumstances of the struggle, that the officers’ use of force was excessive,” Seeborg said.
He said there was conflicting evidence about whether Martinez deliberately struck the officers and whether one of them used a choke hold — prohibited by Pittsburg Police Department policy — that cut off his air supply. A jury could also conclude from the evidence that the city’s “failure to provide more robust policies and training” on choke holds amounted to “deliberate indifference” to
their victims, Seeborg said.
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld Seeborg’s ruling Thursday. A reasonable jury could find that the combined force used against Martinez was excessive and that each officer, including those who entered later, was involved in the use of excessive force, the threejudge panel said.
Michael Haddad, a lawyer for the family, said the incident had echoes of the recent police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the 2014 death of Eric Garner in New York, but in Martinez’s case “it’s the officers who had the nerve to ask the court to give them some legal ‘breathing room.’
“Beto Martinez’s children will now be able to hold the officers who killed their father accountable at trial,” Haddad said.
Noah Blechman, a lawyer for the city and its officers, said they denied causing the death of Martinez or using excessive force against him. He said the court at least should have dismissed the lawsuit against three of the six officers, who arrived about 20 seconds before Martinez lost consciousness and merely helped their colleagues handcuff him.