More than six years after a $25 garden hose allegedly went missing for five days at the Ansonia police station, the city is still locked in a legal battle with the cop accused and later acquitted of stealing it.
The former officer, Mustafa Salahuddin, filed a federal lawsuit against Police Chief Kevin Hale last year alleging the chief and others conspired to have him arrested because they wanted to force him out of the department.
In April, a lawyer representing the police asked a judge to toss the lawsuit out of court, saying they are protected from the lawsuit by a legal doctrine that protects public officials from being sued.
Salahuddin’s lawyers have until Monday (July 7) to respond to the city’s request.
Background
Salahuddin was charged in 2008 with sixth-degree larceny after police accused him of stealing a newly-purchased garden hose from the police department.
The low-level charge went all the way to a jury trial.
It didn’t go well for police and the prosecutor.
The jury in the case took about 30 minutes to declare Salahuddin not guilty.
Click here to read the Valley Indy’s coverage of the case.
Salahuddin, who is Muslim, had claimed that he had been repeatedly targeted by the department’s brass because of his race and his religion. Ansonia police denied those accusations emphatically.
Salahuddin retired from the police department in 2010. That May, the city’s Aldermen voted to pay his legal bills.
He now works as a driver for the Greater Bridgeport Transit Authority, according to a March deposition in his federal lawsuit.
Last February he filed a federal lawsuit against Hale, Lt. Andrew Cota, Lt. Wayne Williams, and two civilian employees of the department involved in the case, dispatcher David Blackwell and maintenance worker Joseph DiVincenzo.
“As a consequence of the wrongful actions of the defendants described above, the plaintiff was arrested and prosecuted, was required to stand trial as an accused thief, was caused to incur substantial expenses for his defense, experienced widespread and prolonged adverse publicity, suffered severe emotional distress, anguish, humiliation and disgrace, and was forced to leave his position as an Ansonia Police Officer and to abandon his law enforcement career,” Salahuddin’s attorney, John R. Williams, states in the lawsuit.
Salahuddin is seeking compensatory damages, punitive damages, along with attorney fees and costs. A specific dollar amount is not mentioned.
Blackwell is no longer employed by the police department, but represents the city’s Seventh Ward as a Republican Alderman.
Motion For Judgment
In April Joseph McQuade, a Hartford-based lawyer representing the police in the case, filed nearly 200 pages of documents in federal court asking U.S. District Judge Robert N. Chatigny to throw the case out of court.
The filings rely on the doctrine of “qualified immunity“ that protects public officials in seeking to have the case tossed.
McQuade argues in the filings the doctrine protects the Ansonia police from liability in the case because their conduct did “not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.”
For one, McQuade argued, Salahuddin can’t make a claim that the defendants in the case are “state actors,” as required.
“In the usual case, there would be no question that municipal police officers investigating a potential crime and making an arrest are state actors,” McQuade wrote in a 32-page memo, which is posted below. “However, this case is different. The defendants did not investigate the alleged crime and did not arrest plaintiff.”
The lawyer points out that Hale referred the case to state police, who investigated the garden hose theft and filed the larceny charge against Salahuddin, and that Blackwell and DiVincenzo were civilian employees who didn’t have police powers.
Further, McQuade argues, even if the judge were to decide the defendants were “state actors,” Salahuddin “still cannot establish a constitutional violation because the defendants’ actions cannot fairly be characterized as causing the arrest and prosecution of the plaintiff.”
And in any event, McQuade wrote later, Hale and the other police department employees acted reasonably under the circumstances.
“Chief Hale contacted the State Police to conduct an investigation in order to eliminate any taint of bias or partiality,” the lawyer’s memo states.
He took issue with Salahuddin’s contention that Ansonia cops should have conducted their own probe before turning the case over to state cops.
But, McQuade argues, “a preliminary investigation posed the danger of compromising the integrity of any later investigation.”
Court records indicate that about two weeks after McQuade filed court papers asking for the case to be thrown out, a four-hour “settlement conference” was held in the case, but the two sides didn’t arrive at a settlement.
Salahuddin’s lawyers have until Monday (July 7) to respond to the city’s motion for judgment in the case.
