Decades-long legal battle aims to reform health care for inmates in California’s prisons

Michael W. Bien, in what he's called "the case of my lifetime," has worked for nearly 30 years to reform health care for the tens of thousands of state prison inmates with serious mental illness. He was on the verge of success in late 2018--he thought--when a dramatic turn shot down apparent gains.

An achievable goal seemed to be in sight as prison officials insisted they at last had enough mental health staff to handle the workload, and showed data to prove it.

"We were wondering how to come to the end game, how to turn the mental health function away from the special master and the courts and back to the state as fixed," Bien said.

He was within days of signing an agreement toward that goal when the prison system's chief psychiatrist blew the whistle on how officials had supplied false and misleading data to the court.

"This has set back the case, necessarily," Bien said. "I'll be needing a lot more evidence that they are being honest and straightforward with us now. The state needs to regain the special master's and my trust."

Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld LLP partner Lisa A. Ells took the lead in a year-long investigation into the chief psychiatrist's claims, culminating in a three-day evidentiary hearing in October 2019 before U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller of Sacramento. The hearing led to Mueller's 49-page order, issued in December, slamming prison officials' contentions that any incorrect information provided to the court and the plaintiffs was the result of inadvertent errors. Coleman v. Newsom, 2:90-cv-0520 (E.D. Cal., filed April 23, 1990). Aiding in the effort were Rosen Bien associates Jessica L. Winter and Cara E. Trapani.

Lisa A. Ells

The hearing was tense, Ells said. "This was serious. The stakes were very high. The [corrections] department had spent a year denying any kind of wrongdoing, and we contended it was intentional. They tried to paint their chief psychiatrist as erratic and impossible to work with, as a crazy character making things up. We had been interacting with these people for a decade, and now we had them on the witness stand."

In her examination on the stand of the chief psychiatrist, Michael Golding, Ells elicited a different version of his character. "We showed why he felt it was important to risk his career and how the department got to the point of trying to shut him up."

Ells also examined on the stand the prison mental health department's quality management chief. "Her job is to track the metrics that show compliance," Ells said. "On the stand she said she didn't view it as her job to report compliance to the court. That was just shocking to all of us--an absolute disconnect between what we and the special master and the court understood to be fundamental to the case. Her data showed they were doing a great job, when they weren't."

Mueller's resulting order was scathing. "Given the constitutional deprivations underlying this case...defendants' expenditure of so much time and effort to create records designed to advance litigation as the primary way to achieve a complete remedy or termination by other means is confounding," she wrote. Mueller identified several officials by name as having misled the court, as being not credible and as displaying a lack of leadership. She did not impose sanctions, but made her displeasure clear.

"The case was a game-changer for us," Ells said. "It upended our perception of the defendants. We were hoping for constructive constitutional change in prison mental health care. To find out about their inaccuracies in reporting was truly upsetting to us. We're hopeful with the new Newsom administration the trust can be rebuilt. This case is not going away."

-- John Roemer