On April 17, 2012, plaintiff Lois Goodman, 70, found her 80-year-old husband dead in their bed, covered in blood, with blood throughout the house in Woodland Hills. There was no sign of forced entry, and Goodman was the last person to see her husband alive. Although the initial judgment on the scene was that Goodman’s husband had likely died from an accidental fall, an initial autopsy led to a lengthy investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department. Goodman was the only suspect. LAPD Detectives David Peteque and Jeffrey Briscoe theorized that between 12:45 p.m. and 1:15 p.m., Goodman followed her husband around their home, repeatedly striking him on the head with shards of a broken coffee mug. Detectives searched Goodman’s home seven times, and crime scene investigation criminalists searched walls and ceilings for blood spatter. Goodman also voluntarily agreed to be interviewed by the detectives four times without an attorney and offered to surrender if she was charged. However, the investigation found that there was no blood spatter at the Goodman home, that there was no blood on Goodman, that there were no on Goodman’s hands, that there were no defensive on Goodman’s husband, and that the cuts on Goodman’s husband’s head were all on the right side. On Aug. 7, 2014, some 3.5 months after the autopsy was conducted, Dr. Yulai Wang, a forensic pathologist and the Los Angeles County coroner, changed the manner of death on Goodman’s husband’s autopsy report from “pending investigation” to “homicide” with no explanation for the change. Armed with the new autopsy report, LAPD officers obtained an arrest warrant with full extradition on Aug. 14, 2012. Briscoe and Peteque knew Goodman would be in New York in August 2012 to referee the U.S. Open tennis tournament, so on Aug. 21, 2012, Briscoe and Peteque flew to New York before Goodman left Los Angeles and arrested Goodman for the murder of her husband as she left her midtown Manhattan hotel. The officers then appeared on a morning television show. LAPD lab tests later revealed that Goodman’s DNA was not present on the coffee mug suspected to have been the murder weapon, and Goodman passed a polygraph test. In addition, the district attorney for Los Angeles retained a criminalist and a forensic pathologist, who both concluded that Goodman’s husband’s death was an accident, thereby discrediting Wang’s and the LAPD’s conclusion. As a result, the district attorney dismissed the criminal case against Goodman. Goodman sued Peteque and Briscoe; two other detectives, Nick Pikor and Pamela Pitcher; the Los Angeles County coroner, Wang; and the employer of the detectives and coroner, the City of Los Angeles Police Department. Judge John Kronstadt granted summary judgment to the defendants in March 2015. However, the Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, reinstated the allegations against Wang, finding that Kronstadt erred in granting summary judgment to Wang, but was correct in finding that no cause of action existed against the LAPD. It also held that Wang’s determination of homicide gave the LAPD probable cause for arrest and that summary judgment was correctly awarded to the four individual LAPD detectives based on qualified immunity. Thus, the matter was sent back to the district court to be tried against Wang. Plaintiff’s counsel contended that Goodman was deprived of her civil rights when Wang recklessly falsified his autopsy report by, among other things, omitting that Goodman’s husband’s were consistent with an accidental fall, by omitting that Goodman’s husband had no defensive , by omitting that Goodman’s husband had died several hours after he was injured (at a time when Goodman was at work), and by re-classifying the manner of death as a homicide, thereby causing Goodman to be falsely accused of murder and maliciously prosecuted. Goodman claimed that she believed that her husband, who was legally blind, tripped and fell down some stairs and landed on the coffee mug while she was away from home. Plaintiff’s counsel noted that the two district attorney experts concluded that Goodman’s husband fell and cut himself on the broken coffee mug. The two experts further concluded that, after his fall, Goodman’s husband walked throughout the house, went back upstairs, crawled onto the bed and died. In addition, plaintiff’s counsel argued that during the 3.5 months between the date of the autopsy and the date of Wang’s final autopsy report, Wang had dozens of unreported contacts with the LAPD detectives, in which the police allegedly pressured Wang to classify the death as homicide, rather than undetermined or accidental. Wang testified that he determined that Goodman’s husband did not fall, but that he could not determine the time of death or the interval between the time of injury and death. He also testified that he was not aware of, and did not follow, the National Association of Medical Examiner (“NAME”) Forensic Autopsy standards. Thus, Wang claimed that Goodman murdered her husband, and he was allowed to elicit testimony from the detectives who were “100 percent certain” that Goodman murdered her husband. However, plaintiff’s counsel was precluded from introducing evidence showing that Goodman did not murder her husband, including evidence of the DNA test results. Defense counsel contended that “pending” is not a classification of death, but a temporary designation, and that when the cause and manner of death are determined, the information is entered into a computer program and the death certificate is automatically updated with no explanation required. Counsel also contended that the system is operated by the state of California and that the Court of Appeals got the procedure completely wrong. Defense counsel asserted that Wang’s conclusion was entirely based on his interpretation of Goodman’s husband’s , described as “multiple sharp-force ,” and that there was nothing “malicious” or bogus about the report. Counsel contended that Wang was following the evidence when making his decision and that Wang was not required to justify or explain his conclusions. Counsel also contended that Wang’s purpose was to correctly identify the manner of Goodman’s husband’s death, and not the perpetrator, and that the deputy coroner was not under any pressure to declare the death a homicide. Defense counsel further contended that the LAPD investigated Goodman for four months before Wang determined the cause and manner of death and that the murder book consisted of eight binders of information. In addition, counsel contended that the autopsy report did not establish probable cause to arrest Goodman, but only established the cause and manner of death and that the probable cause to arrest Goodman was established by the LAPD’s four-month investigation, which had nothing to do with the autopsy report. Thus, defense counsel argued that the autopsy report was shown to have been well written and accurate in all respects and that the conclusion of homicide was supported by several highly regarded forensic pathologists. In response, plaintiff’s counsel noted that Wang’s retained forensic pathology expert opined that Goodman’s husband did, in fact, fall and that the interval between the time Goodman’s husband sustained his and his death was three hours. Plaintiff’s counsel also noted that the Los Angeles Fire Department first responders determined that Goodman’s husband’s time of death was at approximately 5:30 p.m. In addition, the plaintiff’s expert forensic pathologist, who was the Los Angeles coroner’s chief medical examiner, testified that the NAME Forensic Autopsy standards were the minimum required standards for an autopsy report. However, defense counsel noted that the plaintiff’s criminology expert, who was the district attorney’s retained criminalist, is not a medical doctor, was shown to be wrong on two important medical issues, and could not address the pathology that was central to the classification of homicide. Defense counsel also noted that the plaintiff’s forensic pathology expert, who was the district attorney’s retained forensic pathologist, was shown to have misdiagnosed a lesion in Goodman’s husband’s mouth, which was central to his opinion that Goodman’s husband’s death was an accident. In addition, defense counsel noted that the plaintiff’s expert forensic pathologist was impeached for failing to disclose on his resume that he had once worked for the Los Angeles County coroner’s office and was terminated for making a mistake. According to plaintiff’s counsel, Judge John Kronstadt limited each side to 12 hours, including opening statement and closing arguments., Goodman was arrested in New York in August 2012, on the eve of a U.S. Open tournament, while she was wearing her referee uniform. Goodman claimed that as a result, she suffered from emotional distress. Specifically, she claimed that she suffered pain, trauma, and loss of work and reputation as a result of what she claimed was Wang’s “shoddy” work and “faulty” ruling that the manner of her husband’s death was homicide rather than accidental. Thus, Goodman sought recovery of $10 million for her on-camera arrest, a stay at Rikers Island, food poisoning from jail food and the end of her prominence as an in-demand tennis referee, which she claimed was all the result of Wang’s “faulty” ruling of homicide. Goodman also sought to have the coroner revise the ruling on the death certificate.