Years after a controversial overtime fraud investigation, a Los Angeles County jury has ordered the California Highway Patrol to pay $1 million in damages to a former employee after she sued the agency for misusing sexually explicit material found on her cellphone.
Doris Peniche, the CHP’s former overtime coordinator in the East Los Angeles office, alleged that her co-workers inappropriately viewed and shared sexual photographs and videos of her after obtaining the materials through a search warrant.
He sued the CHP and several individuals for negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress and distributing private sexual material, among other charges. A jury ruled in his favor Thursday afternoon after a three-week trial.
The overtime investigation that led to the search of Peniche’s phone 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 by reporting unpaid hours. A search warrant for Peniche’s phone data, including photos 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 though the security detail did not have that much time. Garrett said officers at the East L.A. station claimed at least $360,000 in bogus overtime.
Dozens of people were relieved of duty and the California Attorney General’s Office filed felony fraud and theft charges against 54 of the station’s officers. The roster cuts were so extensive that it prompted a staffing reshuffle agency-wide as the station initially only had about 100 officers.
Although the case made headlines and was promoted as a major corruption investigation by the CHP and the Attorney General, charges were dismissed against all but one defendant.
Peniche was fired from the CHP in May 2019 during the investigation, his attorney, Charles Murray, said.
Murray said he argued during the civil suit that CHP investigators improperly shared sexual material from his device with each other and at least one other employee outside the case.
Members of the criminal investigation team uploaded the material to a shared drive, witnesses testified, and it was also shared with administrators.
Lt. Martin Geller, the author of the search warrant, discovered photos and videos of Peniche giving and receiving oral sex after an initial review of the evidence. He testified that he reported the material to alert other investigating officers.
He said Geller was following CHP policy that potential evidence be shared with the administrative team.
Murray questioned this policy, arguing that it made no sense and would ultimately harm Peniche.
“You have an investigator who knows there’s sex material out there and it’s highly sensitive,” Murray said in court. “It doesn’t seem relevant, but he goes ahead and uploads it to a criminal shared drive. You decide if that policy makes sense.”
A CHP spokesman 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 remain on call for the full eight hours even when they are not in the field and are entitled to extra pay because they can be recalled to a repair site, attorneys argued in a dismissal motion filed in 2022. This approach had been CHP-established procedure since at least 2010, according to several former CHP officials, including former Southern Division Chief William Siegel and Art Acevedo.
In late 2022, an LA County Superior Court judge reduced the charges to misdemeanors, and allowed 54 officers to enter a diversion program as long as they met certain requirements, including paying restitution.
All but one have paid restitution and had their cases dismissed, according to the attorney general’s office. The remaining officer, Pedro Chavez, is due back in court in August.
Former L.A. County District Attorney Steve Cooley, who represented some of the officers in disciplinary hearings, called the overtime prosecution “shameful” and “one of the largest frauds by corrupt law enforcement in California history.”
He said the irony is that the state has spent more money trying to prosecute the officers than what was stolen.
Peniche’s complaint said CHP Sergeants Robert Ruiz and Matt Lentz of the administrative team shared the material with Capt. Melissa Hammond, who was a lieutenant at the time.
The complaint also said Hammond told CHP Sergeant Connie Guzman that the photos “confirmed” rumors that were being spread that Peniche had multiple sexual partners, including her brother-in-law.
Murray denied the rumors and said the photos did not show Peniche with her 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 fire 50-plus people,” he said of the overtime investigation. “Why was there a subfolder of photos in my client’s folder? Was it because she was the overtime coordinator or was it because she was so disliked?”
Defense attorney Joseph Wheeler said his clients properly reviewed the material as part of their investigation.
“You can’t determine if something is relevant or not until you actually review it,” he said during the hearing.
Wheeler attempted to place some of the responsibility on Peniche, and argued that she should not have allowed sexual photographs to be taken of her.
“Once a search warrant is issued for the data on your phone, there is no hope of privacy,” he said. “If you want to keep your body private, why would you let other people take pictures of you?”
Although Peniche testified she was concerned about where her sexual material was spread and who had access to it, Wheeler said there was no evidence the material was leaked outside of the CHP.
Before deliberations, Murray asked the jury to look beyond CHP’s evidence policies when deciding the case.
“You can send a message saying, ‘I don’t care what your policy is, what you did was not right,'” he said.
