A San Diego federal judge’s ruling that unsealed sheriff’s department records regarding inmate deaths and injuries at San Diego County jails was reversed Monday by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The July 2023 ruling from U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta concerned records from the sheriff’s Critical Incident Review Board, an internal oversight body that reviews and investigates inmate deaths and injuries within the jails.
In her written ruling, the judge said there was a legitimate public interest in the contents of the reports and ordered that they may be released with certain redactions to the intervening news organizations — the San Diego Union-Tribune, Voice of San Diego, and Prison Legal News.
The news organizations sought to unseal the records following settlement of a lawsuit filed on behalf of Frankie Greer, who was seriously injured in 2018 while in custody and settled with the county for $7.75 million. Greer’s attorneys obtained the CIRB records under seal before his case settled.
Ohta wrote in her ruling that the public’s demand to see the sheriff’s internal records escalated “because of a high number of inmate deaths in San Diego County jails.”
The county appealed and on Monday, a majority of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that the CIRB reports should not have been unsealed because they were protected by attorney-client privilege.
The appellate panel wrote that “both the participants in the CIRB and its critics consistently viewed the primary purpose of the CIRB as assessing legal liability for a past event and avoiding legal liability for future similar events.”
Monday’s order states that the case has been remanded to the lower court “with instructions to return and/or destroy the disputed documents because they were protected by the attorney-client privilege.”
Judge Lucy Koh dissented from her colleagues, writing that Ohta was correct in ruling that the primary purpose of the CIRB reports was not legal advice, but rather to explore methods for improving conditions at county jails. Koh also wrote that while some portions of the CIRB reports may be protected because they reflect legal advice, she pushed back on the county’s arguments “that the entirety of all of the CIRB reports, including all of their attachments, are privileged, without regard to their contents.”
