Judge orders a halt to sheriff ’s searches
A federal judge has ordered the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office to stop requiring criminal defendants to consent to searches of their bodies and their property and to 24-hour electronic monitoring after they have been released from custody and have not yet been tried or convicted.
The monitoring program ordered by Sheriff Paul Miyamoto in September 2022 appears to violate defendants’ right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable searches, U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar of Oakland said Tuesday in issuing a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the program.
The injunction is scheduled to take effect Feb. 27.
While defendants awaiting trial are supposed to be under the legal supervision of the Superior Court judge who has authorized their release, Miyamoto’s office is “impermissibly imposing its own intrusive conditions of release … on a blanket basis without individualized assessment of their necessity,” Tigar wrote.
Those conditions include consent to a search, at any time, of a defendant’s body, home, automobile or other property, and, by use of an ankle monitor, tracking their locations at all times by GPS.
The ruling is a victory for privacy rights, said Shilpi Agarwal, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, which sued on behalf of three defendants.
“In our legal system, courts, not the sheriff, determine which intrusions on privacy are necessary for public safety, and they must do so in each individual case,” Agarwal said. “The sheriff usurped the court’s authority and did so for every person granted pretrial release, regardless of their individual circumstances.”
The judge recognized that “our clients’ release on electronic monitoring does not give the sheriff a blank check to intrude upon the intimate details of their private lives,” said San Francisco Public Defender Mano Raju.
Miyamoto’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. San Francisco could ask the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to lift the injunction and allow the monitoring to resume while the case proceeds in Tigar’s court.
In defense of the program, the city’s lawyers noted that defendants consent, in writing, to the searches and monitoring when they are released. But Tigar said it does not appear to be “voluntary and knowing” consent because defendants are not told what rights they are surrendering.
Searches of a person and property at any time chosen by an officer constitute “enormous intrusions on protected privacy,” Tigar said. He said plaintiffs in the suit were likely to succeed in their claim that any such conditions must be reviewed and approved by a judge rather than imposed by the sheriff ’s office.
Although Miyamoto’s office modified some of the rules last September, Tigar said, they still amount to likely violations of privacy, and the original monitoring standards continue to apply to 90 defendants who were freed before September and remain on pretrial release.