San Diego County and Sheriff Kelly Martinez have won their appeal in a dispute over records that are part of a nearly $8 million legal settlement the county reached with a man who was seriously injured in the Men’s Central Jail.
The decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a San Diego federal judge’s order to publicly disclose the internal Sheriff’s Department documents Thursday.
Instead, the appeals court ordered that additional legal arguments be presented before a final decision is made over whether the confidential records should be made available to the public. A final resolution is expected to take up to one year.
While the underlying lawsuit was settled in February by the county for $7.75 million, The San Diego Union-Tribune and other news organizations intervened in the case to request that the records — originally filed under seal — be unsealed.
Judge Jinsook Ohta issued an order Tuesday saying the records would be released in 48 hours.
County lawyers argued in their request for an emergency stay that disclosing reports generated by the department’s Critical Incident Review Board would undermine conversations between officials and their lawyers.
“Publicly releasing these documents would have profound consequences on the trust that law enforcement officials place in their legal counsel,” the county’s legal team asserted in its motion Wednesday night.
“Law enforcement, from the line deputies to high-level leadership, would approach their counsel not with candor but with guarded distrust,” the county said.
The county also said there was no harm in delaying the release of the records while further arguments are presented, and that the stay was necessary to allow for a careful review of the legal questions at hand.
San Diego County agreed to settle a claim filed by Frankie Greer, who was seriously injured while incarcerated at the Men’s Central Jail. The payment was part of some $60 million in settlements and jury awards the county has paid in the wake of jail deaths and injuries since 2018.
Lawyers representing Greer obtained nearly a dozen CIRB reports on other men and women who died in sheriff’s custody. After that case settled, the Union-Tribune, Voice of San Diego and Prison Legal News magazine asked Ohta to unseal the documents.
Absent the last-minute appeal — and the 9th Circuit court order — the documents would have been published online Thursday.
Attorneys for the media organizations were not pleased with the emergency stay.
“While we are disappointed the county is continuing to hide this information from the public, we are confident they will lose its appeal,” said attorney Timothy Blood, who co-represents the news outlets.
“We again call on the county supervisors to spend public resources to correct the problems in our jails rather than to continue these efforts to conceal the facts needed to address these problems,” he added.
In a statement on the appeal, department officials said that Martinez “respects the legal process and the decision made by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to allow a full briefing on the legal issues.”
Before the November election, Martinez as a candidate had pledged to release the CIRB findings publicly.
Early this year, after she was sworn in as sheriff, she changed her mind and began instead issuing brief summaries of the internal investigative findings, many less than a single page.
Both the county’s civilian oversight board and the California State Auditor have pressed the Sheriff’s Department to regularly release the CIRB reports.
A bill now making its way through the state Legislature would require the documents to be made available to the public.
