On January 5, 2022, Plaintiffs’ counsel in Hedrick v. Grant, Eastern District of California No. 2:76 CV 00162, released an Amended 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 third quarter of 2021, conducted a monitoring tour of the Jail on December 13, 2021, and interviewed numerous class members between July 2021 and December 2021. The Report specifically finds, among other things, that a severe breakdown of the Jail’s mental health system led to a class-member suicide; that Defendants still have not completed certain physical modifications required by the ACD to mitigate the risk of suicide; that Defendants are not completing required mental health assessments in a timely fashion for class members placed in safety and step-down cells; that Defendants continue to use administrative segregation and other restrictive housing as long-term housing for class members with severe mental illness; that Defendants are not adhering to the staffing plan required by the ACD; that Defendants are not adhering to the grievance procedures requiring by the ACD; and that Defendants are refusing to produce certain documents requested by class counsel that relate to Defendants’ compliance with the ACD. A redacted version of the latest monitoring report is available here. All of the monitoring reports are linked below.
Hedrick Monitoring Reports