PUBLISHED DECISION: THIRD DISTRICT COURT OF APPEAL UPHOLDS OFFICER'S RIGHT TO SEEK REINSTATEMENT

By Amanda Uhrhammer

The Third District Court of Appeal has overturned the ruling of a superior court judge who denied the petition of a Sacramento police officer for reinstatement after her disability retirement application was rejected. (Pitts v. City of Sacramento (2006) 138 Cal.App.4th 853.) Officer Adrianne Pitts was represented by Amanda Uhrhammer and Mastagni, Holstedt, Amick, Miller, Johnsen & Uhrhammer before the appellate court.

Adrianne Pitts applied for an industrial disability retirement from the City of Sacramento in 2001; however, her application was denied by a hearing officer in late 2002. She requested to return to active duty as a police officer, but the City conditioned her reinstatement on several new requirements she had not previously had to meet. Once the superior court denied a petition to have Pitts return to work unconditionally, Officer Pitts accepted the conditions on her reinstatement and again requested to return to work.

City Rejects Officer's Request to Return to Work

Instead of returning Officer Pitts to work, however, the City of Sacramento now claimed she had failed to return to work when ordered to do so under the conditional reinstatement. At issue was a statement by the superior court judge in her earlier ruling opining that "[w]hen [Officer Pitts] refused to report to work as instructed, [the City] had no further duty" to reinstate her.

We challenged the City's decision in a second petition for writ of mandamus. The petition asked the court to compel the City to reinstate Officer Pitts under the conditions the City previously had offered and the officer now was willing to accept.

But the superior court judge, Judy Holzer Hersher, decided the second petition involved the same "primary right" -- i.e., the same duty on the part of the City to reinstate Officer Pitts -- and denied the petition without deciding whether the City in fact was required to return the officer to work. The judge's decision deprived Officer Pitts of any chance at getting her job back, and we appealed.

Court of Appeal Reverses Trial Court

On appeal, the court agreed with us that Judge Hersher had been too quick to foreclose Officer Pitts' second attempt to return to work. Justices Davis, Nicholson and Morrison held it was error for the judge to deny the second petition because "different duties ... and different evidence" were involved in determining whether the City had an obligation to allow Officer Pitts to return to work even with the conditions on her reinstatement. The justices said the trial judge was wrong to invoke her earlier, gratuitous statement that Officer Pitts had "refused to report to work as instructed[.]"

The decision does not involve a mere procedural nuance. The City had played a "Catch-22" game with Officer Pitts' employment by first refusing to retire her for disability, and then imposing conditions on her reinstatement that treated her as too disabled to work. At least one of the conditions, that Officer Pitts pass a pre-employment lie detector test, was plainly illegal under the Public Safety Officers Procedural Bill of Rights Act.

Contrary to the superior court's ruling, wrote the appellate panel, Officer Pitts "is entitled to a judgment on the merits of her claims based on an exploration of all the pertinent facts." The case will now go back to the superior court and the parties so that Officer Pitts may proceed with her case.