ST. LOUIS - A judge was weighing Thursday whether the Police Department can be sued for disposing of seized property without giving the owner a chance to reclaim it.

The circumstances date to August 2004, when an informer — wearing a secret recorder for police — walked into the Flamingo Hotel at 2621 Cass Avenue and traded a laptop computer for cash and a free room.

St. Louis police obtained a search warrant and took a large truck to haul evidence that day. Three laptops at the hotel turned out to be stolen.

The hotel owner, Umesh Patel, pleaded guilty of receiving stolen property and got five years of probation. Then he asked police to return the rest of his property, including $6,000 in cash, three dozen computers, dozens of small electronic devices and a stainless steel dishwasher.

When a judge ordered the police to give it back, the department returned the cash and five computer monitors but said it no longer had most of the rest.

Patel sued the department in 2007, seeking $150,000. The case is slated for trial late this fall.

In court on Thursday, Robert Isaacson, a lawyer for the department, asked Circuit Judge Edward Sweeney to dismiss Patel's case against two specific officers and the Police Board. Because the department is a state agency, he said, it is immune from most types of suits filed in state court.

Anthony Muhlenkamp, a lawyer for Patel, argued that finding the department immune would say that police are free to seize property without returning it.

It was not known when Sweeney would decide.

Patel could not be reached for comment. The Flamingo has since been torn down.

Department records indicated that 20 of his items were sold in the department's annual property auction in June 2005, about 10 months after Patel's arrest, while his criminal case was still pending in court.

The items fetched $386 for a charity that helps families of wounded and slain city police officers.

A sergeant working in the property custody unit said in a sworn statement that he assumed the rest of Patel's property had no value and had been thrown away per department policy.

The case renews questions about how the department handled and disposed of evidence for years. Missouri law requires that police try to return evidence to owners before either auctioning or destroying it.

In 2007, an internal audit found that $22,000 had been stolen from the property custody unit. Most of that cash had been seized from drug suspects in sums ranging from about $100 to $2,000, according to reports obtained by the newspaper through a public records request. The theft was never solved.

Since then, the department has said it has tried to fix "management failures" in the unit and elsewhere.

Last year, police said they were tracking down property owners to give back several years worth of seized cash and property that should have been returned but piled up instead.