Facts

Plaintiffs filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of all California state prisoners with serious mental illness, a class that included more than 32,000 individuals, challenging inadequate mental health care systems that place prisoners at serious risk of death, injury and prolonged suffering.

After a full trial in 1995, the federal court found the State in violation of the Eighth Amendment and issued an injunction requiring major changes in the prison mental health system. Despite two decades of remedial effort, the State struggled to, among other things, implement a viable plan to hire sufficient numbers of clinical staff to provide constitutionally adequate mental health care.

In October 2018, on the eve of plaintiffs agreeing to the State's staffing proposal that would have cut the total number of psychiatry positions by 20 percent, the prison system's statewide chief psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Golding, submitted a whistleblower report accusing the State of providing false and misleading data to the court in an effort to conceal the inadequacy of mental health care being provided.
The court appointed a neutral expert to conduct an independent investigation.

On April 22, 2019, the neutral expert submitted a report finding substantial indications that the State provided misleading information to the court and the court-appointed Special Master. The court set a multi-day evidentiary hearing to adjudicate whether the State had provided misleading data, and what action was required to correct the record and avoid future submission of misleading data.

PLAINTIFFS' CONTENTIONS: Plaintiffs contended that Dr. Golding's allegations were credible and supported by other psychiatrists' testimony within the State prison system. Plaintiffs sought to establish that defendants had knowingly provided false information to the court and the Special Master on multiple occasions, and that significant remedial efforts were necessary to restore trust in the State's data and representations based on those data.

DEFENDANTS' CONTENTIONS: Defendants contended that Dr. Golding had a pro-psychiatry bias and that his allegations were not well-founded. Defendants contended that any incorrect information that may have been provided to the court and the Special Master was the result of inadvertent errors, the absence of course correctors, and vagueness in the court-ordered remedial plan.

Result

The court found, after considering testimony from ten witnesses and documentary evidence, that Dr. Golding's whistleblower allegations were substantially accurate and that California prison officials knowingly presented misleading data to the court and the Special Master in an effort to falsely inflate compliance with court-ordered requirements and artificially reduce the number of psychiatrists required to deliver adequate psychiatric care to the mentally ill prisoners in the State's custody. The court found evidence of considerable bureaucratic dysfunction within the State prison system, and chastised the State for focusing on litigation aimed at terminating court supervision at the steep expense of the seriously mentally ill individuals who have the absolute, undeniable right to constitutionally adequate treatment. The court promised further remedial orders arising out of these findings in the near future.

Length

two days