On September 13, 2023, U.S. Magistrate Judge Edmund F. Brennan approved the Second Amended Consent Decree (SACD) aimed at improving mental health treatment and suicide prevention measures at the Yuba County Jail in Marysville, California. The judge’s order is here. The notice is here. A copy of the Second Amended Consent Decree (“SACD”) is available here.
The terms of the SACD supersede those in the Amended Consent Decree (ACD) that was set to expire on May 31, 2023. The SACD extends for two years all provisions of the ACD relating to mental health and suicide prevention and imposes certain additional requirements aimed at improving the availability and quality of care for people with serious mental illness who are incarcerated at the Jail. The SACD also provides for the appointment of a third-party monitor with mental health expertise to assess whether Defendants are complying with the SACD.
The Appeal-Democrat covered the approval of the SACD in an in-depth article that appeared on September 27, 2023, Court to monitor jail mental health care.
The article quotes RBGG’s Gay Grunfeld, “I have every faith that these individuals are doing everything they can to comply, and it is my hope that the second amended consent decree will be complied with in two years, and the jail will continue to follow these best practices and monitor themselves. No one wants to see poor mental health care or, even more tragically, suicide deaths and overdoses occurring at their local, community jail. We are committed to being good partners to those individuals in government and Wellpath care to continue to work together to avoid tragic outcomes. … The vast majority of people in the jail will be returning to the community. The second amended consent decree has provisions for continuity of care. It’s very important that when people are released from jail, they have their medications and a way to continue their medication, find work in the community and resume their lives after incarceration.”
The case is Hedrick et al. v. Grant et al., United States District Court for the Eastern District of California No. 2:76-CV-00162-JAM-EFB. Plaintiffs Derril Hedrick, Dale Robinson, Kathy Lindsey, Martin C. Canada, Darry Tyrone Parker, are represented by Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld LLP of San Francisco, and the King Hall Civil Rights Clinic of the University of California Davis School of Law.