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 May 28, 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 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 and fourth quarters of 2019, conducted monitoring tours of the Jail on August 26, 2019 and January 27, 2020, and interviewed numerous class members between August 2019 and March 2020. The Report specifically finds, among other things, that the Hedrick Defendants often do not respond to prisoners’ requests for medical treatment within the timelines established by the Amended Consent Decree; that the Defendants do not provide prisoners who need specialty health care with timely access to that care; that the Defendants lack an adequate system for tracking their own compliance with deadlines for providing medical care; that staff at the Jail make it unreasonably difficult for prisoners to file grievances; that Jail staff use inappropriate criteria to dismiss entire categories of grievances without investigating them or providing the grievants with required hearings; and that Jail staff have not undertaken good faith efforts to provide educational and vocational training programs that meet the requirements in the Amended Consent Decree. The Report further notes that the Defendants did not provide 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 – Aug 2019 to Mar 2020, 05-28-2020
Because the Report focuses on the third and fourth first quarters of 2019, it does not assess Defendants’ response to the global pandemic of COVID-19. Nor does the Report provide a full assessment Defendants’ compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Both of these subjects will be a focus of future monitoring reports by Plaintiffs’ counsel.
Persons who have concerns about the Jail’s compliance with the Amended Consent Decree can write Plaintiffs’ counsel at:
Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld, LLP
PO Box 390
San Francisco, CA 94104-0390
ggrunfeld@rbgg.com
mbien@rbgg.com
mfreedman@rbgg.com
agourse@rbgg.com
King Hall
Civil Rights Clinic
U.C. Davis School of Law
One Shields Ave, Bldg. TB-30
Davis, CA 95616
ccwhite@ucdavis.edu