As we mentioned yesterday when we posted the Brief in Opposition, here's the Reply Brief of Petitioner (the City of Los Angeles) in City of Los Angeles v. Lavan, No 12-1073 (cert. petition filed Feb. 28, 2013), the case in which the Ninth Circuit in a 2-1 panel decision held that the city could not presume that property owned by homeless people in the Skid Row area was abandoned, and enjoined the city from seizing and destroying it when the owner was "momentarily away" from it.
The Reply Brief focuss on the circuit-wide impact of the Ninth Circuit's ruling:
The problem is that while the district court’s preliminary injunction may have been limited in scope to the Skid Row area and may have been responsive to such a confined set of facts, the rule of law set forth in the published Lavan opinion is not. The opinion is not limited to the homeless population, or to the geographic area of Skid Row, or to neatly packed shopping carts, or to items that are only momentarily unattended.Rather, the rule of law set forth by the Lavan opinion broadly applies to unattended personal property left on any public property in the entire Ninth Circuit, no matter to whom it belongs, no matter whether it is in a tidy package or an overflowing strand of shopping carts, or whether it has been there five minutes or five days. The Ninth Circuit held that these personal effects left unattended on public property are constitutionally protected and that when City employees remove and dispose of these unattended items during a cleaning operation, the City commits an unreasonable seizure in violation of the Fourth Amendment and deprives the owner of procedural due process in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Reply at 1-2.
Read the whole brief if this is one of your issues. Won't take much time -- it's well-done and only 11 pages.
Petitioner's Reply Brief, City of Los Angeles v. Lavan, No. 12-1073 (June 3, 2013)
