Were hearings delayed for Pierce County Jail inmates? Here’s what happened to lawsuit
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit that alleged Pierce County held people in jail longer than constitutionally permitted without a hearing to determine whether their arrest was justified.
The lawsuit was filed in April on behalf of two people arrested in late 2022 and had sought to be a class-action case. It claimed that the county wasn’t conducting probable-cause hearings within 48 hours of an arrest for people inside Pierce County Jail. A 1991 U.S. Supreme Court ruling established that it was generally unconstitutional to hold someone for as long without a hearing if that person didn’t have a warrant.
On July 26, U.S. District Judge David Estudillo granted the plaintiffs’ motion to throw out the lawsuit, court records show, after the plaintiffs’ legal counsel learned information that undermined a central allegation of the complaint.
The case was predicated on a belief that the county didn’t conduct hearings on weekends or court holidays, meaning that anyone arrested on Fridays and on the bulk of Saturdays would seemingly have been detained for more than 48 hours before receiving a hearing.
Akeeb Dami Animashaun, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, told The News Tribune that attorneys had found no evidence of probable-cause hearings being conducted over the weekend during months of investigation but later learned there was a process on weekends where a judge and prosecutor performed probable-cause determinations.
The judge assigned to the weekend probable-cause duty would review the prior day’s arrest reports for individuals booked into Pierce County Jail, according to Michelle Luna, assistant chief of the Pierce County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office’s Civil Division.
Luna, who handled the lawsuit for the office, said in a statement that the judge determines whether there is probable cause to hold someone until the next court day and sets the conditions of release when probable cause is found.
“When there is a holiday, the court adds additional probable cause reviews to meet the legal requirement that a determination be made within 48 hours,” she said.
Animashaun alleged that the hearings were being conducted “in secret,” which he claimed “also creates a host of other problems and possible constitutional violations that we are currently looking into.”
Luna said that case law made it clear that a hearing on the record was not required when courts make probable-cause determinations.
