A federal judges has killed a former Fullerton College football star's civil rights lawsuit featured in today's Moxley Confidential column.
U.S. District Court Judge James V. Selna granted summary judgment to the Fullerton Police Department and two officers accused by Matthew Goggans of arresting him on trumped up charges stemming from a loud music complaint in 2011.
Selna, a 2003 President George W. Bush appointee, determined that the officers had probable cause to make the arrest after declaring he didn't see a problem with the cops luring Goggans outside to his home porch and then charging him with being drunk in public.
]
The judge determined there was “mixed” evidence on the intoxication count and unworthy of a future jury's consideration.
On the second charge of interfering with a police investigation, Selna declared that the officers' request for Goggans identification was “reasonable.”
“[Goggans'] identity was relevant to the officers' investigation of the noise complaint,” the judge opined. “It is evident that the officers sought the plaintiff's identity not to justify an arrest of plaintiff but as a 'commonsense inquiry' related to identifying the proper party to whom to issue the citation.”
The Orange County District Attorney's office previously disagreed, rejecting both charges made by officers Frank Nguyen and Anthony Ciciarelli as flimsy.
Go HERE to see the column about the incident.
Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
Email: rs**********@oc******.com. Twitter: @RScottMoxley.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.