## Facts

- Jessie and Armida Larez and several of their children sued the City of Los Angeles, LAPD Chief Daryl Gates, and six LAPD officers under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 after officers searched the Larez family home while investigating a gang-related homicide and looking for a suspected murder weapon.
- Less than a week before the challenged search, officers came to the home seeking to contact a Larez son who was not a plaintiff; Armida consented to a search, but when Jessie arrived he demanded the officers leave, and plaintiffs’ evidence described officers pointing guns, using profanity, and making hostile remarks as they departed.
- After another person confessed to the homicide, officers still sought a warrant to search the Larez home based on their belief that the weapon might be there due to the confessor’s association with the non-plaintiff son.
- Officers executed the warrant early in the morning; plaintiffs’ evidence described a forcible entry, firearms pointed at family members, physical force used to control occupants, and threatening language, including conduct affecting children in the home.
- Plaintiffs alleged the search was unreasonable in its execution and involved excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and they sought to hold the City and Chief Gates liable on municipal and supervisory theories tied to LAPD policies and practices.
- During the trial, after Chief Gates testified, he spoke with reporters about the case; multiple newspapers published accounts attributing to Gates statements about the injuries suffered by Jessie Larez and Gates’s comments on an earlier phase verdict against subordinate officers.
- Plaintiffs offered the newspaper accounts at trial as evidence against Gates (and as bearing on the City’s liability). Over objection, the district court admitted the articles without requiring plaintiffs to call the reporters to testify.
- The jury returned verdicts for plaintiffs, and the district court denied defendants’ motion for a new trial. The six officers, Chief Gates, and the City appealed the denial of a new trial.

## Issues

1. Did the district court err by admitting newspaper articles recounting statements attributed to Chief Gates, without requiring testimony from the reporters, where the articles were offered to prove what Gates said and meant?
2. If the admission of the newspaper accounts was error, was it harmless as to the verdicts against Chief Gates and the City?
3. Did the district court abuse its discretion in denying a new trial to the six individual officers in light of the evidence supporting the jury’s findings of an unreasonable search and excessive force?

## Decision

- Affirmed the denial of a new trial as to the six individual officers; the verdicts against them remained in place.
- Reversed the denial of a new trial as to Chief Gates and the City and remanded; the erroneous admission of hearsay evidence was not shown to be harmless with respect to those defendants.

## Legal Principles

- Motions for a new trial are reviewed for abuse of discretion, and appellate review is highly deferential to the jury’s credibility determinations and factfinding when evidence supports the verdict.
- Under § 1983, individual officers may be liable for an unreasonable search or excessive force based on the manner of executing a warrant, even if a warrant existed.
- Municipal liability under § 1983 does not rest on respondeat superior; a city is liable only if an official policy, custom, or decision by a final policymaker caused the constitutional injury (Monell principles).
- Supervisory liability under § 1983 requires a causal link between the supervisor’s own conduct (including policy decisions or deliberate indifference in training, supervision, or discipline) and the constitutional violation; a supervisor is not liable solely because subordinates committed misconduct.
- A party’s own statement may qualify as non-hearsay when offered against that party (Fed. R. Evid. 801(d)(2)), but a newspaper’s account of that statement adds another out-of-court layer: the reporter/editor’s assertion about what was said.
- When evidence contains multiple hearsay layers, each layer must be admissible under an exclusion or exception; a newspaper article offered to prove what a speaker said and meant is generally inadmissible absent a valid basis for the reporter’s account, such as testimony from the reporter and proper foundation.
- Erroneous admission of evidence requires reversal if the error likely affected the verdict; where the disputed evidence bears directly on the elements of supervisory and municipal liability, the court may be unable to treat the error as harmless.

## Conclusion

The Ninth Circuit left standing the jury’s liability and damages findings against the individual LAPD officers for the manner in which they executed the warrant search, but it ordered a new trial for Chief Gates and the City because the jury heard newspaper accounts of Gates’s purported comments without the required evidentiary foundation, and the court could not say that hearsay error did not influence the verdict on supervisory and municipal liability.


Larez v. City of Los Angeles, 946 F.2d 630 (1991)