Sep. 12, 2013
Michael W. Bien
See more on Michael W. BienRosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld LLP | San Francisco | Practice type: Litigation
Bien's 2013 started off with a bang.
Just days into the new year, Gov. Jerry Brown announced not only that he would move to lift a long-standing court order to reduce the state's prison population but also that he would attempt to terminate federal oversight of the prison's mental health care system altogether.
As lead attorney on the case involving the oversight of the mental health care system, Coleman v. Brown, CV90-520 (E.D. Cal., filed April 23, 1990), and co-lead counsel on the case involving the prison reduction order, Plata v. Brown, CV01-1351 (N.D. Cal., filed April 5, 2001), the governor's announcement hit Bien and his clients directly.
He and his colleagues went "immediately into full litigation mode because the remedies for all of our clients were at risk by these surprise motions filed by the governor," he said.
What made the task even more challenging was a ticking clock: Due to a federal law, the motion to terminate the case involving mental health care oversight had to be decided by the beginning of April.
"This was a very frightening prospect, and we sat down and tried to figure out how we could devote the resources," identify and hire relevant experts and so on, he said. "It was very difficult."
But Bien and his colleagues, many of whom worked long hours to meet the deadline, overcame the pressure and won a favorable judgment from U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence K. Karlton when he shot down the state's motion in early April.
Soon thereafter, a three-judge federal panel tasked with overseeing California's prison overcrowding issue denied the state's request to vacate the population reduction order, a ruling the state has since appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
To Bien, Karlton's ruling was rewarding but also bittersweet.
"Winning this termination motion meant that I had proven that the violations still existed. By proving that my clients were still suffering, to that extent, it was a mixed victory," he explained. "I wanted to hope that after such a long remedial process, that conditions were close to fixed."
- Hamed Aleaziz
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