A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit against Layton and two police officers that alleged defamation after the officers falsely accused an 18-year-old Subway employee of spiking lemonade.
The defendants — Layton and two police officers — filed a motion to dismissed the suit after U.S. District Judge Dee Benson heard arguments on the case March 7.
On Thursday, Benson granted the request, writing that the owners of the Subway shop didn’t sufficiently prove that their constitutional rights had been violated.
The officers, who reported the story of the alleged drink-spiking to news outlets, didn’t imply that the Subway shop was negligent or participated in what they believed was drug-spiking, according to Benson. The officers, he wrote, didn’t suggest that Subway tolerated drug use or that it could have prevented such an incident.
“To the contrary,” the decision continues, “the only statements directly about Subway were that it had been cooperative, and that its customers saw no reason not to continue to eat there.”
Even if the officers had violated the Subway shop owners’ constitutional rights, the two policemen, Detective Clint Bobrowski and Lt. Travis Lyman, would be entitled to immunity because they were serving the city, the judge ruled.
“No matter how much the Plaintiffs now want to make more of the story than the facts allow,” Benson wrote in the decision, “this is simply a case involving news of an arrest based on reasonable suspicion and of a person facing the possibility of criminal charges.”
At most, this is a case of a negligent police investigation, Benson wrote, not a violation of constitutional rights.
“I think the decision is wrong,” Robert Sykes, the attorney for the Subway shop owners, said Friday. “I respectfully disagree.”
The reports did the Subway shop owners a lot of damage, he said, adding that he didn’t now whether his clients would try to appeal the decision.
On Aug. 8, 2016, a Layton police sergeant ordered a lemonade and a sandwich from the 1142 E. State Route 193 Subway location.
He allegedly felt “seriously impaired” shortly after taking a sip of the lemonade, the lawsuit states, and accused an 18-year-old who worked the drive-thru window of spiking the drink with methamphetamine and tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive element in marijuana that is also known as THC.
Police officers conducted a drug-scanning “ion test” on the drink, which showed the presence of the drugs. But, the lawsuit states, the test has a “known high false positive rate.” State crime lab results later showed that there was nothing illicit in the lemonade.
The employee was searched and interviewed. Dallas Buttars and Kristin Myers, the owners of the Layton subway shop, allowed police to search the building, take samples of liquids, watch surveillance video and bring drug-sniffing dogs onto the property.
No evidence of drugs was found.
The same day, Bobrowski gave a KSL news reporter “a scoop on this ‘poisoning story’ before it had definitively tested the drink,” and “before it knew whether any crime had been committed, and before it knew whether anyone had in fact been poisoned,” the lawsuit states.
The news story was reported internationally.
Sales dropped off, and several employees quit the store after being questioned by police, according to Buttars and Myers.
An 18-year-old was arrested but never charged. He is not included in the lawsuit and is on a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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