There’s a guy in Houston named Dennis Laviage. I have not heard of him previously, but he’s supposedly a well known scrap metal dealer “best known for buying Houston’s scraps with $2 bills”.
Mr. Laviage is engaged in a lawsuit against a former Houston Police sergeant, Jesse Fite. Mr. Laviage accuses Mr. Fite of withholding evidence from a judge, leading to a wrongful arrest.
In Texas, scrap metal buyers like Laviage are required to report purchases to the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS). The city of Houston also requires they send reports to a national database called Leads Online. This is, in part, so law enforcement can trace potential metal thieves who sell stolen scraps to unsuspecting buyers.
In 2015, C&D Scrap Metal was using a program called Scrap Dragon to fill out the proper forms and send them off to DPS and Leads Online. In the summer of that year, a glitch in Scrap Dragon withheld a handful of C&D’s reports from DPS, but all of the reports were still being filed with Leads Online. Once Laviage became aware, he notified police and insisted that he would file reports with DPS manually until the software issue was resolved.
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Still, Fite continued his pressing until March 2016, when he filed for criminal charges against Laviage. In an application for Laviage’s arrest warrant, Fite accused the scrap metal dealer of “intentionally and knowingly” failing to report those scrap metal purchases to DPS. In the application, nowhere did it state that Laviage contended he knew about the issue and was actively trying to correct it.
A judge found probable cause for Laviage’s arrest based on the application. Several Houston police officers arrested him at his now-shuttered Heights location soon after. In September 2018, a jury found Laviage not guilty of the misdemeanor charge, and the case was expunged from his record. In December that year, Laviage filed a lawsuit in Harris County against Fite for false arrest and malicious prosecution, which was eventually moved to the federal court in the Southern District of Texas.
What’s interesting about this case to me is: last week, a federal judge ruled that Mr. Fite cannot raise a “qualified immunity” defense in this case. In theory, “qualified immunity” states that law enforcement can’t be sued for doing things within the scope of their employment. (I Am Not a Lawyer, and I am oversimplifying here.) In practice, “qualified immunity” has been used to cover a wide range of questionable behaviors: Reason has run a lot of stories on qualified immunity abuses.
Generally, a rejection of a QI defense is rare, so this story is noteworthy on that basis alone. But it also gives me a chance to throw in something absolutely unnecessary, but I think semi-relevant to metal theft:
I can’t believe that I’m sending kudos to Lynn Hughes, who was the most overturned Judge in the District when I worked there. But it seems that this one is earned. Fite couldn’t have had a worse judge for this case.
As my family is known to say, “Even a blind pig finds an acorn sometimes.”
I had this Jack Webb/Johnny Carson bit on a record album of comedy bits and pieces way back when. It always cracked me up, and they did it so well.
Yeah, I’m amazed at their ability to do that in (as far as I can tell) a single take. I couldn’t do that in one take if I spent all day trying…