Gay Crosthwait Grunfeld  

As the managing partner of Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld LLP in San Francisco, Gay Crosthwait Grunfeld practices complex civil litigation, but she is perhaps best known for breaking the chains of brutality for prisoners with disabilities.

In Armstrong v. Newsom, an Americans with Disabilities Act case, Grunfeld and her team at RBGG and The Prison Law Office achieved extensive orders requiring the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to use body cameras and audiovisual surveillance to protect incarcerated people with disabilities from abuse by correctional officers, as well as requirements to improve investigations and discipline officers.

Yet she hopes for even greater transformation within the entire prison system, one which will promote CDCR’s mission of rehabilitation and reduce the overall prison population.

“What we need is a complete culture change within the organization. We need to have officers who are more supported and educated,” she said. “We need extensive training … and then once they have been hired and trained, there needs to be swift and thorough accountability if someone deviates from the norms, and once those pieces are in place, the institution as a whole will improve.”

Grunfeld currently leads a team of three law firms attempting to reform the San Diego jail system and bring it into compliance with ADA and constitutional requirements. With the highest death rate among county jails in California, San Diego has only recently begun “to take baby steps toward reaching compliance, including such steps as removing people who need wheelchairs from the top of the triple bunks,” she said. “But it is still a very out-of-compliance system, with poor medical and mental health care, as well as inaccessible showers, toilets and beds, causing significant harm to people with mobility disabilities.”

In a particularly pernicious example, she notes that the county recently paid $8.5 million to a man who had a seizure and fell off a high bunk.

“This is an expense that should have never happened,” she said, “and that’s the kind of consequences faced by a jail system that doesn’t comply with the Constitution or the ADA or California state law with regard to disability accommodations.”

While it may “require more planning and effort, it is absolutely required,” she said, “so we need, as a society, to start treating people equally, and that means accommodating their disabilities.”

— Kathryn Stelmach Artuso