The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined appeals to overturn a ruling that upheld an excessive force finding in a 2017 fatal police shooting in San Jose, and a separate ruling in which double-jeopardy protections were denied to a man charged for the third time in a 1992 Mountain View cold-case killing.
The city of San Jose appealed a federal civil jury’s 2022 verdict that found Officer Michael Pina liable for excessive force in the shooting death of Jacob Dominguez. Attorneys for the city had argued that Pina was entitled to qualified immunity, a legal protection that shields government officials from litigation over work actions absent a constitutional violation.
Both the federal district court in San Jose and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied Pina that protection. The Supreme Court declined to review those decisions, effectively finalizing the verdict, which awarded $1 million to Dominguez’s family.
The high court’s decision not to review the case was accompanied by a dissent from Justice Samuel Alito that was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. In his dissent, Alito argued that the appellate court errantly applied a 2022 precedent to officers involved in stopping Dominguez on a North San Jose street five years prior. He wrote that he was not swayed by the lower court’s reasoning that the precedent case applied because it was built upon a 2014 case addressing qualified immunity.
Dominguez had been sought by police in connection with an armed robbery three days before the Sept. 15, 2017 shooting at North White and Penitencia Creek roads. Attorneys for the city of San Jose, who defended Pina, argued that police had reasonable belief that Dominguez was armed based in part on his suspected role in the robbery and his gang and criminal past.
Pina and two officers pinned Dominguez’s car with their vehicles; the central dispute at trial revolved around whether Dominguez had his hands up at the time of the shooting or was reaching for something the officer believed might be a gun. Dominguez was unarmed.
While the jury issued the excessive-force verdict, it rejected or could not reach agreement on several other claims, including allegations that Dominguez’s constitutional rights were violated, and that Pina acted with malice, setting the stage for the city’s appeals that have now reached their terminal point.
“We appreciate the court’s consideration of the petition and wish the court had more capacity to take on cases like this one where we believe the lower courts did not correctly apply the law, as Justice Alito argued in his dissent,” City Attorney Nora Frimann wrote in an email to this news organization. “The judgment has been final so we will be concluding this litigation.”
In another South Bay-related decision handed down Monday, the Supreme Court denied a review of the case of John Kevin Woodward, who currently faces a murder charge for the third time in the 1992 strangling of Laurie Houts in Mountain View.
Woodward was put on trial twice in the 1990s for Houts’ killing, with both proceedings ending in mistrials. After the second mistrial in 1996, the trial judge mentioned “insufficiency of the evidence” in his dismissal of the charges.
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The Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office re-filed a murder charge against Woodward in July 2022 after Mountain View police revisited the Houts case and commissioned a refreshed DNA analysis of a piece of rope that investigators had determined was the murder weapon.
Woodward got the new charge dismissed by a trial court judge in August 2023 on double-jeopardy grounds, but that ruling was overturned in March 2024 by the Sixth District Court of Appeal, which sided with prosecutors’ position that the 1996 judge’s insufficiency remark did not equate to an acquittal and meant the new charge did not subject Woodward to double jeopardy.
The state Supreme Court declined to review the Sixth District decision. As part of the U.S. Supreme Court’s denial of review, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote an assessment stating her belief that California case law may conflict with that of the Supreme Court on the issue, but that it’s a matter “the California Supreme Court should assess.”
“I encourage the California Supreme Court to address this question,” Sotomayor wrote.
Woodward, who had been living in the Netherlands at the time of his most recent arrest, was ordered to home detention in Northern California pending the resolution of the criminal case. A preliminary examination is scheduled for June, court records show.
