County of Sonoma, California, et al. v. Rafael Mateos Sandoval, et al.

This petition presents three issues of first impression in this Court, all of which arise out of a judgment for damages under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against a local municipality based on its enforcement of a vehicle impound statute enacted by the State of California. The opinion and judgment of the Ninth Circuit on these issues are of constitutional magnitude and have created a direct conflict in the Circuit Courts of Appeals regarding the scope of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution relating to claims the government has over-detained lawfully seized property. The issues presented in this petition are as follows:

1. Whether the Fourth Amendment can be violated by the government’s mere continued detention of property even though its full-blown seizure satisfied the Fourth Amendment, as the Ninth Circuit held below, or whether the Fourth Amendment does not apply to such continued detentions of lawfully seized property, as the First, Second, Sixth, Seventh, and Eleventh Circuits have held.

2. Whether a municipality may rely on the State Legislature’s purposes in enacting a vehicle impound statute – to deter unlawful driving and save lives – to justify its enforcement of that statute as reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.

3. Whether a municipality’s reasonable misinterpretation of a State statute transmuted it into a “local policy” for the purpose of rendering the