When Robin Bishop was raped and killed by a California Highway Patrol officer, her parents trusted the judicial system would help right the wrongs that led to her violent death.
But on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court dashed the Cedar City couple's last hope that the state of California would assume civil responsibility for their 23-year-old daughter's death.The Supreme Court on Monday refused to revive the $100 million lawsuit Merlin and June Bishop filed against the California Highway Patrol in connection with the Jan. 11, 1982, slaying of their daughter.
Prosecutors said patrolman George Michael Gwaltney stopped Bishop while she was en route to Las Vegas, Nev., after visiting a friend in California. Gwaltney handcuffed and raped the woman in the back seat of a patrol car and then shot her, prosecutors said. He is serving a 90-year prison sentence for depriving the woman of her civil rights.
"We thought the verdict was proper and all, but there should have been some (punitive) compensation and there wasn't," Merlin Bishop said in a telephone interview Monday.
Bishop said he and his wife are not bitter that the Supreme Court has effectively terminated the suit. However, the lengthy court proceedings have kept their daughter's death at the forefront of their thoughts.
It is time to put the matter behind them, he said.
"It was a terrible thing and so unnecessary," Bishop said. "But the law is the law. Some of the technicalities we thought might be overturned were not. We'll just have to live with it."
A California appeals court threw out the suit last year, ruling it was without merit. The court said the federal civil rights law the Bishops cited in their suit was limited to claims against "persons" and there was no legal authority that the state of California was a person.
The suit alleged that Gwaltney's supervisors were aware that he had stopped other women for supposed traffic violations and forced them to have sex with him. The suit alleged that the state condoned the action as long as its officers issued enough traffic tickets.
A similar suit against the state of Utah is pending in U.S. District Court. Former Utah Highway Patrol trooper Ernest B. Wilcock is accused of sexually assaulting women he stopped for alleged traffic violations.
Although denied the remedy they sought, Bishop said carrying the suit all the way to the Supreme Court has had some therapeutic value.
"We at least tried because we felt we were right," he said.
Bishop said he was not surprised that the Supreme Court refused to overturn the California court decision.
"There's not much to say. We've pushed the thing all the way through to the Supreme Court, and there's some technicalities the Supreme Court upheld the state on.
"That's the end of the line," Bishop said. "There's no point in being bitter. All it does is hurt us."