Legal Question in Personal Injury in California

Re: Do I have a tort action worth pursuing in civil court

Probably not. Whether you have a case against the police department would depend heavily upon what information the officers had at the time of your arrest, and you have said nothing about this. Unless the police arrested you in bad faith (i.e. when it was clear that they had no grounds to do so), my sense is that you would not have a viable case.

You just might a viable claim against the D.A.'s office if the prosecutor kept the case going after he knew that you were innocent. It would not be enough to prove that he would have lost the case. Instead, you would have to prove that he knew he was prosecuting an innocent man. This very seldom happens, and even when it does it is hard to prove.

People who are arrested and prosecuted because of a good-faith mistake have no basis to sue. It is not enough that you turned out to be innocent; you would also have to show that the people involved actually knew that you weren't guilty. Your question does not provide any reason to believe this is true or that you would be able to prove it in trial.

But even if you could win your case I don't know how much you would be able to collect in damages. It doesn't sound like you were jailed while all of this was going on and you haven't explained how much impact all of this had on your life (Did you lose your job as a result of this? Were you prevented from getting some kind of license or forming a contract which you would have been able to do otherwise?), so I have no sense of how much injury you have suffered. You would be able to recoup any provable financial losses such as attorney fees, days missed from work and the costs of any bonds you had to file. You would also be able to recover for your anguish and the damage to your reputation. You might even be able to recover punitive damages in an amount proportionate to your compensatory award. All of this presumes, of course, that you could prove your case.