Michael W. Bien

Bien took a rare trip from sheltering at home to the downtown San Francisco offices of Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld where he is a name partner. He sought to escape noisy construction work in his neighborhood. It didn't go well.

"I got absorbed in work until I realized it was just after five p.m., and the garage where I'd parked had closed with my car locked in," he said. "Downtown is very strange now, a lot of places boarded up, deserted like Christmas Day only worse."

As the coronavirus rages Bien is operating at top speed on a trio of prison cases, seeking safety and relief for vulnerable inmates with health problems, disabilities and mental health issues. "It's the busiest I've been in five or 10 years. I'm working 200 hours a month," he said. Visits to prisons are out, so he and colleagues at his firm and co-counsel at the Prison Law Office tried looking at conditions virtually via an iPad video link.

"Wi-Fi was so spotty there wasn't the bandwidth to make it work," he said. "It remains surprising that although video surveillance is everywhere, there are almost no cameras in prisons. There was money in the governor's budget for cameras, but that got dropped out. We'd like body cams on guards because we know how that changes things."

Because California prisons are vulnerable to Covid-19 outbreaks, Bien has spent much of the pandemic litigating for population reductions and other measures to prevent harm to prisoners and the community. Judges overseeing the medical care and mental health care cases have required the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide detailed plans regarding the prisons' Covid-19 responses. Plata v. Newsom, 01-cv-01351 (N.D. Cal., filed April 5, 2001); Coleman v. Newsom, 2:90-cv-00520 (E.D. Cal., filed April 23, 1990).

On July 28, U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar of Oakland ordered CDCR to set aside 100 beds at each institution for isolation and quarantine space. On July 28, U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller of Sacramento ordered the state to promptly identify whether any incarcerated persons with serious mental illness will have to be moved to accommodate the isolation and quarantine bed set-asides.

Separately, Bien and colleagues have worked to protect incarcerated people with disabilities from assaults by prison guards. Armstrong v. Newsom, 4:94-cv-02307 (N.D. Cal., filed June 29, 1994). "We have bad-ass guards beating people with disabilities," Bien said. "When prisoners file grievances, then they really get assaulted. This is where the lack of cameras really is a problem. The authorities move so slowly to fix these things. Maybe by the next pandemic in 100 years they'll be ready."

-- John Roemer