Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price acted in haste and missed a procedural deadline when she refiled charges in April against three City of Alameda police officers, their lawyers say.

The case from April 2021, in which Mario Arenales Gonzalez died while being restrained by police, was a tragic one, and it garnered significant attention from the media as it occurred less than a year after the similar death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Gonzalez, 26, who did not appear to be up to anything illegal — though he may have stolen some booze from a nearby store and was drinking from an open container — was hanging around in a small city park and acting strangely when neighbors called to report his behavior. Three Alameda police officers arrived and tried to question Gonzalez, who gave incoherent answers to questions. And when they decided to detain him, Gonzalez resisted, and was pushed to the ground facedown, where he appeared to struggle as officers tried to get handcuffs on him.

As seen in bodycam footage, Gonzalez perished relatively quickly while in this prone position, and the death was ruled to be homicide, with contributing factors of obesity, physiological stress, and alcoholism. The initial coroner's determination also deemed the primary cause of death to be "toxic effects of methamphetamine."

One year after the death, former Alameda County DA Nancy O'Malley declined to file charges against the three officers, saying that their actions on that day were "objectively reasonable."

But the family had an independent medical examiner review the case, and a subsequent report ruled the primary cause of death to be "restraint asphyxiation," and found that the levels of meth in Gonzalez's bloodstream were too low to be a contributing factor.

DA Pamela Price took office in early 2023 and vowed to take another look at the case, and on April 18, 2024, one day before the three-year anniversary of Gonzalez's death and the day that a statute of limitations for filing charges would have expired, Price announced new charges against the officers.

"If people don't believe that police officers or law enforcement can be held accountable, then witnesses won't cooperate. We can't do our job without witnesses," Price said at the time. "We won't be able to administer justice if the community doesn't trust that the system is going to work for everyone on an equal basis."

The attorneys for the three officers now say that Price's office had more paperwork obligations to fulfill before that statute of limitations expired than just the filing of charges, because these were not fulfilled, the judge should dismiss the case entirely. As Bay Area News Group reports, the attorneys argue that prosecutors needed to get a judge to sign off on an arrest warrant as well, prior to April 19, and instead they only secured "good cause to detain" orders.

The DA's office says it declined to get arrest warrants at the time as a "courtesy" to the officers.

Now, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Elena Condes will hear arguments over the procedural issue on Friday.

As Alison Berry Wilkinson, an attorney for one of the accused officers, tells the news group, "The DA’s office thinks everybody but them needs to follow the rules."

Gonzalez's family continues to seek justice in the case, and Gonzalez's mother, Edith Arenales, tells the news group she is "heartbroken and outraged" that the case might come down to a procedural error.

In December 2023, the family won an $11 million wrongful death settlement from the City of Alameda.

Previously: Alameda County DA Charges Three Officers Over 2021 In-Custody Death Where Previous DA Had Declined to Charge