Dugard lawyer will ask 11-judge appeals panel to review her lawsuit against U.S. government
SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) - A lawyer for Jaycee Dugard, who was held captive in an Antioch backyard for 18 years, said today he will ask an expanded U.S. appeals court to reconsider her lawsuit against the federal government for parole supervision failures.
Dugard, 36, claims in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco in 2011 that if federal parole officers had been doing their job, she never would have been kidnapped and raped at age 11 by Phillip Garrido in 1991.
Instead, she claims, Garrido's federal parole from an earlier kidnapping and rape would have been revoked for repeated drug and alcohol violations and he would have been back in prison.
Dugard's new appeal comes after a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Friday by a 2-1 vote reaffirmed an earlier decision dismissing her lawsuit.
Her attorney, Jonathan Steinsapir, said he will now ask the appeals court to have the case reviewed by an expanded 11-judge panel.
"The case is important because it defines the liability of the federal government in the largest state (by population)," he said.
The appeals court reserves the expanded review, known as en banc review, for only the most important cases and grants only about 20 such hearings each year.
Steinsapir said he has 45 days to file the petition for en banc review.
Friday's ruling by the three-judge appeals panel has the same result as the earlier 2-1 decision issued by the panel in March.
But the new decision expounds the majority's reasoning in a 14-page opinion, while the previous majority decision was only two and one-half pages long.
Steinsapir had filed a request asking the court to issue a more detailed "reasoned opinion" because of the "factual issues of unique interest and substantial public importance" of the case.
"I appreciate that they did that, although I am disappointed in the results," he said.
In both the March ruling and last week's decision, the appeals court said Dugard could not sue for the allegedly negligent federal parole supervision because she was not a specifically identifiable victim at the time.
"While our hearts are with Ms. Dugard, the law is not," Circuit Judge John Owens wrote in Friday's decision.
Dugard was kidnapped by Garrido and his wife Nancy on June 10,
1991, as she walked to a school bus stop outside her home in South Lake Tahoe.
She was kept captive in sheds and tents in the backyard of their house near Antioch for 18 years, was repeatedly raped by Phillip Garrido and gave birth to two daughters when she was 14 and 17.
Dugard and her daughters were discovered and freed in 2009 after
Garrido raised suspicions when he brought the two girls with him to the University of California at Berkeley campus to seek an event permit.
Both Garridos pleaded guilty in El Dorado County Superior Court in 2011 to charges of kidnapping and rape. Phillip Garrido was sentenced to 431 years in prison and Nancy Garrido to 36 years to life.
Garrido was on federal parole from 1988 to 1999 after being released early from a 50-year prison sentence for the 1976 kidnapping and rape of a South Lake Tahoe woman. In 1999, the parole supervision responsibility was transferred to the state of California.
The state awarded Dugard a $20 million settlement in 2010 for failures in the state parole supervision between 1999 and 2009.
Dugard currently helps run the JAYC Foundation, which provides support and treatment to the victims of kidnappings and other traumatic events and their families.
She has written two books: "A Stolen Life" in 2011, a memoir of her abduction and captivity, and "My Book of Firsts," published this summer, about her experiences after being freed.