Simon v. City and County of San Francisco

Background

The San Francisco Sheriff’s Office administers electronic monitoring for criminal defendants released before trial under its Program Rules. Plaintiffs allege that the Sheriff exceeds its authority by imposing conditions that violate the United States and California Constitutions. They specifically challenge a four-way search clause and conditions allowing location-data sharing.

In an earlier order, the Court granted in part and denied in part the defendants’ motion to dismiss, certified two subclasses, and granted plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction. The subclasses were the original-rules subclass and the revised-rules subclass. The Court set February 27, 2024, as the compliance deadline. The defendants then moved to stay part of the injunction while pursuing an anticipated appeal and alternatively asked the Court to modify the injunction. They also asked for two additional weeks to comply with the order concerning the four-way search condition for the original-rules subclass.

Legal standard

A stay pauses enforcement of a court order. The party requesting a stay must show that the circumstances justify one. Courts consider the likelihood of success on appeal, the risk of irreparable harm without a stay, the harm to other parties, and the public interest. A stay of a preliminary injunction requires a stronger showing than the showing required to obtain preliminary injunctive relief.

Reasons for denying a stay

The defendants argued that they might succeed on arguments concerning where plaintiffs could challenge the location-data-sharing condition, whether plaintiffs had standing because they had not shown that their data was shared before filing suit, and whether the sharing rule was constitutional. The Court found that these arguments largely repeated arguments it had already rejected. It also stated that the record included evidence that the defendants had shared Plaintiff Bonilla’s location data and showed increasing location-data sharing by the Sheriff.

The Court further relied on its earlier analysis of privacy interests in location information and the unconstitutional-conditions doctrine. That doctrine generally prevents the government from conditioning a benefit on surrendering a constitutional right. The Court had previously found that the Sheriff’s location-sharing rule likely violated class members’ constitutional rights and concluded that the defendants had not shown a sufficient likelihood of success on appeal.

The defendants argued that preventing location-data sharing would harm the Sheriff’s public-protection mission and could allow some pretrial releasees to violate stay-away orders or commit other crimes. The Court found that these generalized crime-prevention concerns did not outweigh the harm from the likely constitutional violations. It also found that the balance of harms and the public interest weighed against a stay.

Request to modify the injunction

The defendants asked for two more weeks to comply with the order requiring them to stop enforcing the four-way search condition as to the original-rules subclass. They described efforts to arrange new state-court hearings at which class members could receive revised admonitions. The Court found that the defendants did not explain how they could bring the plaintiffs to those hearings without arrest warrants and noted plaintiffs’ uncontested argument that warrants for people complying with their release conditions would be unlawful. The Court also concluded that the proposed process would merely move some plaintiffs from one unconstitutional practice to another.

Disposition

The Court concluded that a stay pending appeal was not warranted. It denied the defendants’ request to extend the implementation deadline and denied the request to otherwise modify the injunction. The order states that the defendants’ motion for a partial stay or modification of the injunction is denied.