A Hard Road to Ditch a Bum Felon Jacket

Roger v. Cnty of Riverside, No E070776 (D4d2 Jan. 22, 2020)

Plaintiff in this case is a surgeon who got thrown in jail for civil contempt when he refused to produce some patient records. The county running the jail created a record that he had been jailed for a felony conviction. Which isn’t true. Civil contempt is civil—notwithstanding the custody, it’s not even a misdemeanor. The felony rap lead plaintiff to losing work and other difficulties. Plaintiff sued the County for § 1983, defamation, and other claims relate to the false recording of him as a felon.

A bunch of the appeal deals with code claim processing issues that are beyond my coverage. Suffice it to say that an SJ on them gets reversed. But there are three procedural points of note.

First, during the litigation, the County ultimately fixed the plaintiff’s record by manually recording it as a civil confinement in its system. It argued that make the plaintiff’s claims for declaratory relief and writ of mandate moot. But there was no admissible evidence (see #2) that the County had implemented a procedure to ensure it correctly documented civil confinements in the future. Given the immense consequences of a felony rap, that failure was of sufficient public importance to merit an exception from the mootness doctrine on these claims.

Second, it arguing mootness, the County put in a declaration stating that based upon the declarant’s understanding, the court system had fixed the way it documented civil contempts. But a declarant’s “understanding” is not personal knowledge. It is instead a form of information and belief. It thus is not competent summary judgment evidence under Code of Civil Procedure § 437c(d), which requires declarations on personal knowledge. 

Third, the Court reverses a demurrer on a § 1983 Monell claim, where plaintiff had alleged that the County knew it didn’t have any procedure to accurately book inmates for civil contempt and thus that the way it trained its employees was deliberately indifferent to inmates civil rights. The Court of Appeal finds that, notwithstanding the relatively high level of generality, that allegation was an adequate statement of “ultimate facts” to satisfy the fact pleading standard. As the court explains, the standard is contextual—plaintiffs are under a lesser obligation of specificity when the facts address issues within the knowledge of the defendant.

Reversed.

SJ Experts Must Be Disclosed by Statutory Deadline

Perry v. Bakewell Hawthorne, LLC, No. S233096 (Cal. Feb. 23, 2017)

Based on the statutory deadlines, California’s somewhat unique method of expert discovery—a mutual exchange of expert information—ordinarily happens after summary judgment briefing is completed. Prior cases have thus held that when the expert exchange deadlines haven’t run, the failure to pre-disclose an expert whose testimony is used in connection with a summary judgment motion does not merit preclusion under Code of Civil Procedure § 2034.300, which applies to undisclosed trial experts.

What happens, however, when the circumstances of the schedule wind up with the expert exchange date occurring before summary judgment? Some older cases held that the disclosure deadline applied only to trial experts, so the failure to exchange information didn’t preclude an expert’s use on summary judgment, even if the exchange date had passed. But the Supreme Court, in an unanimous opinion by Justice Corrigan, disagrees and disapproves those cases in a pretty straightforward analysis. 

Section 437c(d) says that summary judgment affidavits must “set forth admissible evidence.” And § 2034.300 says that the testimony of expert witnesses whose information has not been exchanged as of the exchange date is inadmissible. So unless the party offering the testimony SJ can show one of the exceptions to § 2034.300—such as good cause for a tardy disclosure, see § 2034.710—the undisclosed expert’s testimony is inadmissible and can’t be used at summary judgment.

Court of Appeal affirmed.