City settles with UO students over search.

Byline: Rebecca Nolan The Register-Guard

The city of Eugene has agreed to pay $22,500 to settle a federal lawsuit filed by two University of Oregon students who claimed that two Eugene police officers illegally searched their apartment.

One of the officers was Roger Eugene Magana, who currently is serving 94 years in prison for sexually abusing women on the job. The other was officer Mel Thompson, who still works for the department.

In the settlement reached Sept. 27, plaintiffs Phillip Piper and Julie Dickenson each will receive $11,250.

"There was no admission of liability," said Jan Bohman, spokeswoman for the city manager's office. "It was more fiscally prudent to settle than to go to trial."

Piper and Dickenson had hoped to force the city to change police policies regarding welfare checks, noise complaints and citizen complaints about police officers, said Eugene attorney Marianne Dugan, who represented Piper.

"I know this sounds like a cliche, but the money wasn't really the point," Dugan said Monday. "They were really hoping for some substantive changes."

The city wrote in settlement papers that it has no written policy regarding noise complaints and no plans to develop one. The department also has no plans to revisit its policy regarding welfare checks, which was revised in 1993. However, the city is currently reviewing how it handles complaints against police personnel. Several changes have been instituted pending the outcome of the /review.

"Our hope in bringing this federal civil rights action was to put pressure on the city and the Eugene police to give more than lip service to substantive police reforms," Eugene attorney Lauren Regan said in a written statement. Regan represented Dickenson in the suit.

"Despite the recent PR campaign by EPD touting the reform process that is supposedly going on in response to the wrongdoing of Magana and other officers, few, if any policy changes have been made to date, and those that have been made are weak at best," she said.

The students filed their suit in March seeking a court order forbidding similar searches in the future and asking for undetermined payments from the officers and the city for damages and as punishment.

The lawsuit alleged that the officers showed up at the couple's apartment at the French Quarter, 1103 W. Sixth Ave., at 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 26, 2002, pounded on their door and awakened them and two houseguests with demands to be allowed inside.

Piper has said that the officers blocked the peephole in the door so he could not identify them, and he did not understand what they meant when they loudly announced, "EPD." Dugan said Monday that Piper and Dickenson had been in town for about a month after moving from Minnesota and were not familiar with the term.

Piper has said he did not believe the men when they announced "police," so he asked to see a warrant or some identification.

The officers had no warrant. Instead, according to the lawsuit, they got a key from a building supervisor, entered, forced the four people inside to remain on the couch and searched for more than an hour. They found nothing illegal.

Magana cited the couple for a noise violation and later claimed in a report that he was investigating a noise complaint. The couple later were acquitted of the noise violation in Eugene Municipal Court.