Gay Grunfeld, Michael Bien, Michael Freedman, and Alexander Gourse of Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld LLP (RBGG), along with the King Hall Civil Rights Clinic at the University of California Davis School of Law, represent a certified class of all prisoners in the Yuba County Jail in Hedrick v. Grant, Eastern District of California No. 2:76 CV 00162. The parties reached an agreement on an Amended Consent Decree improving conditions and disability access at the jail on August 23, 2018. U.S. Magistrate Judge Brennan of the Eastern District of California granted final approval to the Amended Consent Decree on January 30, 2019. Plaintiffs’ counsel are now monitoring the County’s compliance with the decree.
For immediate release – On October 9, 2020, Plaintiffs’ counsel in Hedrick v. Grant, Eastern District of California No. 2:76 CV 00162, released a Monitoring Report on conditions at the Yuba County Jail. This Report concludes that the Hedrick Defendants still are not in compliance with multiple provisions of the Amended Consent Decree approved by Federal Magistrate Judge Edmund F. Brennan in early 2019. To produce the Report, Plaintiffs’ counsel reviewed documents covering the first and second quarters of 2020, conducted a monitoring tour of the Jail on July 10, 2020, and interviewed numerous class members between March 2020 and August 2020. The Report specifically finds, among other things, that Defendants are not providing class members with medical and mental health care in a timely fashion; that Defendants are not meeting their health care staffing obligations; that Defendants have a practice of housing class members in administrative segregation for no reason other than the class member’s mental illness; and that Defendants are not providing adequate testing for SARS-CoV-2 to prevent a potential outbreak of COVID-19 at the Jail. The Report also notes that Defendants still are not providing Plaintiffs’ counsel with sufficient information to monitor compliance with a number of other requirements in the Amended Consent Decree.
The report is here: Monitoring Tour Report – Yuba County Jail – Apr-Aug 2020, 10-9-2020