San Diego pays out $2.5M in excessive force, false arrest case involving police detective

San Diego is paying out $2.5 million, including nearly $1 million in attorney’s fees and litigation costs, to settle a case of alleged excessive force and false arrest by a city police detective in 2016.

It’s one of the largest payouts in San Diego history.

Gregory McNally suffered severe face and head injuries at the Fashion Valley trolley station in July 2016 when Detective Daniel Riis pepper sprayed him and threw him to the ground during an incident captured on video.

McNally filed suit in June 2018. A federal jury awarded him just over $1.5 million in November after a weeklong trial.

The City Council is scheduled Tuesday to approve a $2.5 million settlement, the money awarded by the jury and nearly $1 million in attorney’s fees and litigation costs.

The council unanimously approved the deal in a session closed to the public on Dec. 8. McNally’s attorneys are Michael Marrinan and Joseph McMullen.

The case had several unusual elements.

The arrest of McNally, who was heading home after a night out drinking with friends, was prompted after someone other than McNally threw an iPhone charging block and it landed near detectives, according to court documents.

Detectives said the phone charging block made a “deafening noise” and sounded like a gunshot, attorneys for the city argued. The detectives thought “a large heavy object had been thrown down on them,” the attorneys said in court papers.

After McNally was thrown to the ground he was arrested for resisting arrest and public intoxication, but prosecutors declined to file charges.

Lawyers for the city argued unsuccessfully in the civil case that security camera video of the incident should be excluded as evidence because it was not an accurate portrayal of what happened.

Those lawyers also argued that the initial judge in the case should be removed because her son had previously sued the city over injuries allegedly suffered during a bicycling crash.

While the judge, U.S. District Court Judge Janis L. Sammartino, insisted she could be fair, she ultimately chose to step down to avoid an appearance of impropriety. She was replaced by Judge Cathy Ann Bencivengo before the trial began.

A city audit unveiled last summer found that San Diego spent $220 million on payouts, from fiscal 2010 through fiscal 2018, an average of about $25 million a year.

But of 20,000 total cases filed during those nine years, only 313 ended with payouts higher than $50,000 and only 16 cases cost the city more than $1 million each.

The audit recommended the city adopt a more centralized, analytical approach to preventing police misconduct, sidewalk falls, water main breaks and collisions involving city vehicles — the main causes of large payouts.