Ramachandran v. Best Best & Krieger

Background

Satish Ramachandran alleged that Los Altos city employees, attorneys connected with Best Best & Krieger, and his neighbor Pamela Jacobs coordinated against him in connection with disputes over home improvements and building-code enforcement. Among other allegations, he claimed that officials applied the building code unequally, retaliated against him for complaining about alleged racial misconduct and code enforcement, and obtained a search warrant based on false information. He also alleged that Jacobs sent the City a letter reporting supposed code violations on his property.

The operative complaint asserted four claims at issue in these motions: First Amendment retaliation under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against all defendants; Fourteenth Amendment equal protection under § 1983 against the City Employee Defendants and Jacobs; a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act claim against all defendants; and intentional infliction of emotional distress against Jacobs. The court applied the motion-to-dismiss standard, under which a complaint must allege enough facts to make a claim plausible. The court also considered whether amendment would be futile—that is, whether changing the complaint could cure the problem.

BBK Defendants

The attorneys and law firm argued that their conduct was protected by prosecutorial immunity. The court agreed. It held that obtaining the search warrant, submitting materials supporting the warrant, issuing or enforcing administrative code-enforcement notices, and pursuing the related misdemeanor prosecution were prosecutorial activities closely connected to the judicial process. The court said the alleged falsity or improper intent did not eliminate that immunity. It therefore dismissed all claims against the BBK Defendants with prejudice because no amendment could overcome the immunity.

City Employee Defendants

The City Employee Defendants argued that the claims were barred by claim splitting, a rule generally preventing a plaintiff from maintaining separate lawsuits based on the same subject matter against the same defendant. The court found that this case and the earlier federal lawsuit arose from the same group of events, involved substantially the same evidence and rights, and could conveniently have been tried together. The court also found that the RICO claim relied on the same underlying facts and property-related injury as the claims in the earlier lawsuit. It concluded that claim splitting barred all three claims against the City Employee Defendants and dismissed them with prejudice because amendment could not cure the problem.

Jacobs

The court dismissed the intentional-infliction-of-emotional-distress claim against Jacobs with prejudice for two independent reasons. Ramachandran did not address the claim in his opposition to the motion, which the court treated as abandonment, and the alleged conduct—installing security cameras and reporting alleged code violations to the City—did not plausibly constitute outrageous conduct.

The court dismissed Ramachandran’s remaining claims against Jacobs under the Noerr–Pennington doctrine. That doctrine generally protects a person from liability for petitioning the government for redress. The court held that Jacobs’s letter, sent through her attorney and asking the City to address alleged code violations, was petitioning activity. It rejected the argument that the letter fell within the exception for objectively baseless or sham petitioning, finding that the letter and its photographs showed a genuine effort to obtain government action. Those claims were dismissed with prejudice because amendment could not cure the deficiency.

Disposition

The court ordered that the First Amendment retaliation claim against all defendants, the Fourteenth Amendment equal-protection claim against the City Employee Defendants and Jacobs, the RICO claim against all defendants, and the intentional-infliction-of-emotional-distress claim against Jacobs were dismissed with prejudice. The only remaining claim was a § 1983 malicious-prosecution claim, which was not part of the motions, and the court made no ruling on its validity.