Years after a controversial overtime fraud investigation, a Los Angeles County jury awarded a former California Highway Patrol employee $1 million in damages after she sued the agency for mishandling sexual content. found on his cell phone.
Doris Peniche, a former CHP overtime coordinator in the East Los Angeles office, claimed her colleagues improperly viewed and shared her sexual photos and videos after obtaining the material through a search warrant.
She sued CHP and several others for negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress and distribution of private sexual material, among other charges. The jury ruled in her favor Thursday afternoon after a three-week trial.
The overtime investigation that led to Peniche's phone being searched first became public in 2019, when CHP Southern Division Chief Mark Garrett held a press conference alleging that dozens of officers had defrauded the agency for hours not worked. The search warrant for Peniche's phone data, including photographs and cell tower pings, was issued in July 2018.
Garrett said officers assigned to protect Caltrans workers repairing Southern California freeways billed the CHP for eight-hour overtime shifts even when the protective detail didn't take that much time. Officers at the East Los Angeles station claimed at least $360,000 in fraudulent overtime, Garrett said.
Dozens of them were relieved of duty, and the California attorney general's office filed felony fraud and theft charges against 54 police officers. The split on the roster was so wide that it triggered an agency-wide personnel reorganization because the station housed only about 100 officers to begin with.
Although the case made headlines and was touted by the CHP and attorney general as a major corruption investigation, charges against all but one of the defendants have since been dismissed.
Peniche was fired from the CHP in May 2019 amid the investigation, her attorney, Charles Murray, said.
Murray argued during the civil trial that CHP investigators improperly shared the sexual content of his device with each other and with at least one other employee outside of the case, Murray said.
Members of the criminal investigation team uploaded the content to a shared drive, witnesses testified, and they also shared it with administrators.
Lt. Martin Geller, author of the search warrant, discovered photos and videos of Peniche giving and receiving oral sex in his initial review of the evidence. He told other investigating officers about the contents to alert them, he testified.
Geller was following CHP policy of sharing potential evidence with the management team, he said.
Murray questioned that policy, arguing that it made no sense and ultimately hurt Peniche.
“You have an investigator who knows there is sexual material and is very sensitive,” Murray said in court. “It doesn't seem to be relevant, but he goes ahead and uploads it to the shared criminal unit. You decide if that policy makes sense.”
A CHP spokeswoman declined to comment.
While internal investigators saw corruption in the overtime investigation, attorneys for the accused officers and several former CHP leaders saw “standard operating procedure.”
Officers assigned to Caltrans overtime details routinely stayed on duty for a full eight hours, even if they were not in the field, and were entitled to extra pay because they could be called back to the repair site, attorneys argued in a motion to dismiss filed in 2022. That approach had been CHP's established procedure since at least 2010, according to several former CHP executives, including former Southern Division chiefs William Siegel and Art Acevedo.
In late 2022, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge reduced the charges to misdemeanors and granted the 54 officers entry into a diversion program as long as they met certain requirements, including paying restitution.
All but one paid restitution and their cases were dismissed, according to the attorney general's office. The remaining officer, Pedro Chávez, is due back in court in August.
Former district of Los Angeles County. Lawyer. Steve Cooley, who represented some of the officers in the disciplinary hearings, called the overtime processing “shameful” and “one of the great frauds committed by corrupt authorities in the history of California.”
Ironically, he said, the state spent more money trying to prosecute the agents than they ever claimed was stolen.
CHP Sergeants. Robert Ruiz and Matt Lentz, of the administrative team, shared the material with Captain Melissa Hammond, who was a lieutenant at the time, according to Peniche's complaint.
The complaint also says Hammond told CHP Sgt. Connie Guzmán that the images “confirmed” the rumors that had been circulating about Peniche having multiple sexual partners, including her brother-in-law.
Murray denied the rumors and said the images did not show Peniche with his brother-in-law or several men. He also said Hammond and others acted outside the scope of their duties to intentionally harm Peniche.
“They're trying to see if there's enough material to lay off more than 50 people,” he said of the overtime investigation. “Why was my client's folder the only one that had a photos subfolder? Was it because she was the overtime coordinator or was it because she was immensely disliked?
Defense attorney Joseph Wheeler said his clients properly reviewed the content as part of their investigation.
“You can't determine if something is relevant unless you actually look at it,” he said during the trial.
Wheeler attempted to hold Peniche responsible, arguing that she should not have allowed sexual photographs of herself to be taken.
“Once the search warrant is issued for your phone data, any expectation of privacy disappears,” he said. “If you wanted to keep your body private, why would you let other people take photos of you?”
Although Peniche testified that he was concerned about where his sexual material was being disseminated and who had access to it, Wheeler said there was no evidence that the content was leaked outside of the CHP.
Before deliberations, Murray told jurors to look beyond CHP evidence policies in deciding the case.
“You can send a message and say, 'I don't care what your politics are, what you did is not right,'” he said.
