Court rejects appeal in civil-rights suit against Belvedere, officer

A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected federal civil-rights claims brought by the owners of Yema clothing boutique against Belvedere over a police incident at the downtown Tiburon shop in 2020.

The six-page ruling, issued Sept. 11, affirmed a May decision of the Northern District Court in San Francisco that the shop owners didn’t sufficiently make the case that Belvedere police officer Jeremy Clark, recently promoted to sergeant, was involved in a conspiracy with Tiburon cops to harass and intimidate them on account of their race, and he didn’t fail to intervene because of their race. It also said the lower court didn’t abuse its discretion by denying the owners’ lawyer additional opportunities to revise the legal complaint.

The ruling did not address any legal aspects of the Tiburon Police Department’s involvement in the encounter or the lower court’s ruling that the owners may still pursue separate state-level civil-rights claims of negligent training, interference with the couple’s constitutional rights and the city’s liability for Clark’s alleged misconduct.

David Anderson, the Mill Valley-based attorney for plaintiffs Yema Khalif and Hawi Awash of Tiburon, says they’ll now pursue the state claims they filed in Marin Superior Court on April 25. Anderson said that case was on hold pending the federal ruling, but a case-management conference is now set for Oct. 8.

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