LOS ANGELES (Legal Newsline) – A Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy will be fired after all, because she failed to report a colleague’s excessive force for fear of being labeled a rat.
Initially, former deputy sheriff Meghan Pasos had her termination overturned by a trial court, which awarded her back pay and told the L.A. County Civil Service Commission to consider a lesser penalty.
But the Second Appellate Division on July 27 reversed that ruling, finding the trial court substituted its own discretion when determining the appropriate penalty.
Her trouble started when she saw a fellow deputy at Men’s Central Jail push a man’s face into the wall, leading to severe bleeding.
“I wasn’t going to question my partner on why he used force or why he didn’t use force. It is not my place to ask him the details of the force that he used. That’s the supervisor’s job. That if he used force he need[s] to report it,” Pasos testified at the commission hearing.
Her claim she had no duty conflicted with her first excuse – that she did not want to tell on her partner.
“I thought that if I stepped above him, and took it on myself and reported it, I was going to be ratting on him and I was afraid of the repercussions of, you know, ratting on him with my partners,” Pasos first said.
The appeals court found Pasos’ attempt to perpetuate a code of silence negatively impacted the operation of the jail and was too egregious to make up for a lack of prior discipline.
“We recognize Pasos’ conduct did not involve the level of dishonesty at issue in many law enforcement discharge cases,” Justice Gail Ruderman Feuer wrote.
“But we are not ‘free to substitute (our) discretion for that of the administrative agency concerning the degree of punishment imposed.’
“Given the department’s reasoned explanation that discharge was necessary in light of Pasos’ furtherance of the code of silence in the Men’s Central Jail and the resulting embarrassment and loss of trust in the Department, this is not the ‘exceptional case’ where ‘reasonable minds cannot differ on the appropriate penalty.’”