Kimberly Long v. Thomas Weeks;

NOT FOR PUBLICATION
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT
KIMBERLY LONG,
Plaintiff-Appellee,
v.
THOMAS WEEKS; et al.,
Defendants-Appellants.
No. 23-55004
D.C. No.
5:21-cv-02008-FWS-E
MEMORANDUM*
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Central District of California
Fred W. Slaughter, District Judge, Presiding
Argued and Submitted March 28, 2024
Pasadena, California
Before: RAWLINSON, LEE, and BRESS, Circuit Judges.
Officers Thomas Weeks, Ronald Anderson, Daniel Bloomfield, Robert
Newman, Daniel Verdugo, and Jeffrey Glenn (Appellants) appeal the district
court’s denial of their motion to dismiss Kimberly Long’s (Long) complaint
alleging claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for failure to intervene in the violation of
FILED
APR 18 2024
MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK
U.S. COURT OF APPEALS
* This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent
except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3.

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Long’s constitutional rights, conspiracy, malicious prosecution, failure to collect or
preserve evidence, fabrication of evidence, and suppression of evidence. We have
jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291. We reverse in part and vacate and remand in
part for the district court to consider the plausibility of Long’s claims as to each
individual defendant.
“We have jurisdiction under the collateral order doctrine to review a district
court’s rejection of a qualified immunity defense at the motion to dismiss stage,
and we review such a denial de novo.” See Polanco v. Diaz, 76 F.4th 918, 925 (9th
Cir. 2023) (citations omitted). “When engaging in such review, we accept as true
all well-pleaded allegations and construe them in the light most favorable to the
non-moving party.” Id. (citation, alterations, and internal quotation marks
omitted).
1. We have jurisdiction notwithstanding whether Appellants raised disputes
of fact or improperly relied on materials outside the pleadings in their opening
brief. See id. To the extent Appellants did either, we did not consider them as part
of our de novo review. See id.
2. This appeal is not moot by virtue of the district court’s acceptance of the
second amended complaint. See Griggs v. Provident Consumer Disc. Co., 459
U.S. 56, 58 (1982) (“The filing of a notice of appeal . . . confers jurisdiction on the
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court of appeals and divests the district court of its control over those aspects of the
case involved in the appeal.”).
3. Appellants are entitled to qualified immunity on the conspiracy claim
because it is not clearly established that the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine is
inapplicable to Section 1983 claims. See Ziglar v. Abbasi, 582 U.S. 120, 153
(2017) (“Under . . . the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine[,] . . . an agreement
between or among agents of the same legal entity, when the agents act in their
official capacities, is not an unlawful conspiracy.”).
Given the implausibility of Long’s conspiracy claim, we remand for the
district court to conduct an individualized assessment of whether each Appellant is
entitled to qualified immunity for Long’s remaining Section 1983 claims. See
Cunningham v. Gates, 229 F.3d 1271, 1282, 1287 (9th Cir. 2000), as amended
(holding that the district court erred by “never conduct[ing] an individualized
analysis to determine whether each moving defendant was entitled to qualified
immunity based on his or her individual actions”).
REVERSED IN PART, VACATED AND REMANDED IN PART.
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