Judge issues remedial order in prisons mental health case

A U.S. judge in Sacramento issued her first remedial order against the state in a decades-old case on prisoner mental health care.

The changes U.S. District Court Judge Kimberly J. Mueller ordered this week follow from her ruling earlier this month that officials with the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation "knowingly misled" the court and the court-ordered receiver about the care prisoners were receiving. The case is nearing its 30th birthday and has been in a remedial phase since 1995. Coleman v. Newsom, 90CV00520 (E.D. Cal., filed April 23, 1990).

With the agreement of the parties, Mueller said she is considering ordering the prisons department to move its health care data from "the CDCR Mental Health Headquarters to the California Correctional Health Care System (CCHCS) Quality Management Section," overseen by the receiver. Meanwhile, she ordered that the special master, currently Matthew A. Lopes Jr., have access to all data, be included in all official discussions of the data and all business rules used to produce official reports.

These changes followed the presentation of evidence that prisons officials had changed rules, including how often patients needed to see a psychiatrist, without informing or consulting with the receiver or court.

Reached earlier this month, plaintiffs' attorney Michael W. Bien said the recent problems with data reporting only came to light due to a whistleblower state psychiatrist's report released as his side was about to make major concessions on mental health care staffing levels.

"We asked to have more access and transparency to their data so that we won't be surprised like that and so we can actually tell the court what is going on," said the partner with Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld LLP in San Francisco, the lead firm representing the plaintiffs.

Mueller wrote part of her goal was to emphasize the importance of the court's authority to Dr. Diana Toche, undersecretary of Health Care Services, and other corrections department officials. She gave the agency 14 to 30 days to comply with each of the steps she ordered or lay out how it plans to do so.

"As discussed in the December 17, 2019 order, the court expects that Undersecretary Toche 'is thinking deeply about a proper response to plaintiffs' counsel's question ... about how she can work to make clear to those who work for and with her that 'CDCR has been found to have violated the Constitution as to the mental health program and is under a remedial order supervised by this court' and that 'Coleman is not just a word' but signifies a federal court order, 'upheld by the United States Supreme Court[,] that governs a remedial process,'" Mueller wrote.