Van de Kamp v. Goldstein
Issues
Whether supervising prosecutors can claim absolute immunity from civil law suits that allege their failure to establish policies guaranteeing criminal defendants’ constitutional rights, or whether such actions are “administrative” in nature and therefore only eligible for qualified immunity.
After being wrongfully convicted of murder based on the perjury of a jailhouse informant, Thomas Lee Goldstein brought a Section 1983 suit against John Van de Kamp and Curt Livesay, the chief prosecutors at the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. Goldstein alleges that the prosecutors failed to establish a system to share information about benefits given to informants, with the result that the prosecutor who tried Goldstein did not have information on the informant and consequently did not inform Goldstein, as is constitutionally required. Van de Kamp and Livesay claimed absolute immunity from civil suit, based on the Supreme Court’s decision in Imbler v. Pachtman. The Ninth Circuit, however, held that since their alleged failures were administrative, and not prosecutorial in nature, Van de Kamp and Livesay were not entitled to absolute immunity. In further defining the boundaries of absolute immunity, the Supreme Court’s decision will affect the amount of protection from personal liability prosecutors can have at all levels of government, as well as affect the potential remedies available to criminal defendants who were wrongfully convicted based on prosecutorial misconduct.
Questions as Framed for the Court by the Parties
1) Where absolute immunity shields an individual prosecutor’s decisions regarding the disclosure of informant information in compliance with Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963) and Giglio v. United States, 405 U.S. 150 (1972) made in the course of preparing for the initiation of judicial proceedings or trial in any individual prosecution, may a plaintiff circumvent that immunity by suing one or more supervising prosecutors for purportedly improperly training, supervising, or setting policy with regard to the disclosure of such informant information for all cases prosecuted by his or her agency?
2) Are the decisions of a supervising prosecutor as chief advocate in directing policy concerning, and overseeing training and supervision of, individual prosecutors’ compliance with Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963) and Giglio v. United States, 405 U.S. 150 (1972) in the course of preparing for the initiation of judicial proceedings or trial for all cases prosecuted by his or her agency, actions which are “intimately associated with the judicial phase of the criminal process” and hence shielded from liability under Imbler v. Pachtman, 424 U.S. 409, 430 (1976)?
Thomas Lee Goldstein, a twenty-five-year-old engineering student and Marine Corps veteran, was arrested in 1979 for a Long Beach, CA shooting. See Brief for Respondent at 2. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison based on the testimony of an eyewitness (who later admitted that he only identified Goldstein as the murderer because of police intimidation), and the testimony of a jailhouse informant by the name of Eddie Fink, who claimed that Gold