Federal Judge: San Francisco Could Be Held in Contempt for Violating Warrantless Search Ban

A federal judge on Thursday found that San Francisco’s sheriff has routinely violated a court order that prohibits warrantless searches of people released from jail who are awaiting trial and warned that the city could be held in contempt if the practice continues.

The ruling came in response to a class-action case filed against San Francisco and its sheriff, Paul Miyamoto, in 2022 by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. The lawsuit alleges that the electronic monitoring program overseen by the sheriff violates the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution when it requires defendants to consent to searches without warrants or probable cause, even in cases when judges don’t impose what’s called a “search condition.”

The case also challenges the sheriff’s practice of sharing with other law enforcement agencies GPS data from people released pretrial whose location is tracked with electronic ankle monitors.

“We want to make sure that the Sheriff’s [Department] is not unilaterally exercising authority that does not belong to it in order to increase its ability to surveil and search people in San Francisco,” Emi Young, an ACLU NorCal attorney, said in an interview on Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar issued a preliminary injunction earlier this year prohibiting the Sheriff’s Office from continuing to enforce the warrantless search conditions and sharing locations of pretrial defendants.

Despite that order, however, the judge found that the Sheriff’s Department had not stopped imposing their intensive search conditions, which violated the court order.

In Thursday’s ruling, Tigar noted that the sheriff had violated the preliminary injunction in two different ways. He pointed to statements from San Francisco trial judges that said they imposed a search condition only because it is a “prerequisite for electronic monitoring” under the sheriff’s program. And in other cases when judges didn’t order a search condition, the sheriff imposed one anyway, according to Tigar’s ruling.

Those practices hindered San Francisco trial judges from exercising their discretion when releasing defendants facing criminal charges, Tigar added. He noted that the sheriff’s policies pushing the court to issue intensive search conditions are in violation of the “spirit” of the injunction originally issued.

“To the extent Defendants have been uncertain about whether their conduct violated the Court’s order, that uncertainty has now been resolved,” Tigar wrote in his scathing ruling on Thursday. He stopped short of moving to hold San Francisco in contempt but invited plaintiffs to “renew their request for the Court to begin contempt proceedings” if the city continues to defy the preliminary injunction.

Tigar said during the hearing that despite San Francisco’s attempt to appeal the preliminary injunction, his order is “still the law” and that the defendants are required to adhere to it.

The Sheriff’s Department declined to comment.

During the hearing, an attorney for the plaintiffs requested that the judge order the Sheriff’s Department to file a report with the information of every person who had been detained while on pretrial electronic monitoring without a court-ordered search condition. The judge denied the request but noted that the plaintiffs could request such information at a later point in the case.

“One of the fundamental principles of constitutional law is that when it comes to decisions about whether your rights are going to be curtailed or whether you’re going to be subjected to certain kinds of searches and surveillance, that those decisions are going to be made by a neutral decision maker,” said Young, the ACLU attorney. “It’s very concerning to us when law enforcement agencies like the sheriff go beyond what they have been authorized to do by the court in order to conduct their own surveillance regime.”