HRM443: Sharon Marie Evans v. Sir Pizza of Kentucky, Inc

HRM443: Case Analysis 3 Sharon Marie Evans v. Sir Pizza of Kentucky, Inc. 2012 U.S. App. LEXIS 789; 2012 FED App. 0046N (6th Cir.) The issue is whether the county government was guilty of negligent hiring. SUTTON, Circuit Judge. On the evening of February 12, 2008, Sharon Evans ordered a pizza and salad from Sir Pizza, a restaurant in Lexington that pledges on its website to deliver food “fast as the law allows.” What caught the attention of the police was not the speed of the delivery, but odors emanating from Evans’s home, which smelled like the kinds of chemicals used in a meth lab. All of this set off a bizarre chain of events that led to her arrest, trial and acquittal on a charge of harassing a police officer. Evans sued Sir Pizza, its deliveryman, various local officials and the Lexington– Fayette Urban County Government on a dozen or so legal theories. The district court granted summary judgment to all defendants on the ground that the lawsuit lacked merit. . . . We affirm. After Evans phoned in her order, deliveryman Brian Taylor brought it to her house. While making the delivery, he noticed a strong chemical odor coming from inside. Taylor thought the odor could be a byproduct of a meth lab, which worried him because he thought it might show up on a drug test he had to take. Later that night, he voiced his concern to Lexington Police Officer Dawn Dunn, when he ran into her at a gas station. Dunn, along with her colleagues Raymond Terry and Noel Warren, investigated. They determined that Evans had an outstanding arrest warrant for contempt of family court, then went to her house to serve her with the warrant and to investigate possible drug activity. When they got there, they too smelled a strong chemical odor, which Evans told them was a combination of Pine-Sol and bleach used to clean the house earlier in the day. The officers claim that Evans tried to close the door on them and physically harassed Officer Terry. They arrested her on the outstanding warrant and for harassment, but after searching the house (with Evans’s consent) they decided there was insufficient evidence to charge her with any other offense. The government prosecuted Evans on the harassment charge, but a jury acquitted her. Evans filed this lawsuit against Taylor, Sir Pizza, the officers and the city/county government on a bevy of grounds: violations of 42 U.S.C. § 1983; criminal conspiracy to violate her civil rights, see 18 U.S.C. § 241; criminal trespassing and assault; slander, libel and defamation of character; invasion of privacy; a RICO violation; municipal and corporate liability for failure to train and negligent hiring and retention; false arrest and false imprisonment; intentional infliction of emotional distress; malicious prosecution; and negligence. The district court granted summary judgment to all defendants on all claims. It reasoned that Evans had failed to produce any evidence that the county government had a policy or custom of insufficient training or negligent hiring; that the supervising officers were not involved in the incident in question; that Evans’s arrest was lawful because it was made in connection with a valid arrest warrant; that the officers had not used excessive force in arresting her; that the criminal statutes under which Evans sought to bring claims do not provide for civil liability; that RICO is inapplicable; that Taylor and Sir Pizza were not acting under color of state law for the purposes of § 1983; and that Evans had failed to produce sufficient evidence to create an issue of material fact on any of her other state-law claims.