A Good Day for Access to Justice

Jameson v. Desta, No. S230899 (Cal. Jul. 5, 2018).

The Court of Appeal decision in this case bothered me so much that I contacted the plaintiff and offered to represent him pro bono. We got review granted back in 2016. Today, the Court held in our favor in a 7-0 opinion by the Chief Justice. The short and slightly oversimplified of it is that the right to equal access to the courts requires state courts to provide indigent litigants with an official court reporter to transcribe their trials. But you should read it for yourself. There’s a lot of other good stuff in there too.

Court of Appeal reversed.

Fun and Games with Interpleaders

S. Cal. Gas Co. v. Flannery, No. B268298 (D2d5, as modified Dec. 13, 2016)

This case is an interpleader action that was the subject of a prior appeal affirming the denial of an anti-SLAPP motion. The facts are a kind of complicated, but since interpleader doesn’t come up too much, it’s worth getting into it a little.

Good Luck to All That

Randall v. Mousseau, No. B263945 (D2d7, as amended, Sept. 16, 2016)

In California, the appellant bears the burden of showing error. That means, among other things, that she needs to present the record on appeal. There are two different records—a written record, and a record of oral proceedings. And then for each type of record there are various options to compile. For the record of oral proceedings, the standard is a court reporter’s stenographic transcript. (In the lingo of California state court, a “reporter’s transcript.”) See Cal. R. Ct. 8.130. That’s been the case since modern stenography came into place during the mid-20th Century. But there are other options.

One More Chance to Lose . . .

Jameson v. Desta, No. D066793 (D4d1 Oct. 20, 2015)

Pro se Plaintiff in this thirteen-year-old case is on his fourth appeal. The first three times he won; over a ten-year span, he managed to get two of trial court’s dismissal orders and a summary judgment reversed. This time, the trial court nonsuited him during his opening statement. Whether right or wrong, he forfeits his appeal on that issue because he couldn’t afford a court reporter to make a record. That seems pretty arbitrary and unfair, particularly since the Legislature recently modified the reporter fee statute—Government Code § 68086(b)—to say that for an indigent litigant with a filing fee waiver, the official reporter’s fee is waived. The court here thinks differently, because the trial court in question does not generally provide official reporters for trials. It makes parties hire their own. So it’s not a question of a fee waiver, but of plaintiff’s inability to afford the private reporter pro tem he needed to hire to make his record. Still seems unfair.

Affirmed.

Full disclosure: I am representing the appellant in this case pro bono in filing a petition for review with the California Supreme Court. We’ll see . . . .

**Update: Review Granted!

When it Comes to the Record, Designate or Forfeit

Aspen Grove Condo. Ass’n v. CNL Income Northstar LLC, No. C073530 (D3 Nov. 3, 2014)

This is a lawsuit involving damage to neighboring land due to the failure of a retention basin.  Most of the opinion deals with substantive issues involving injunctive relief, but there is one interesting point of procedure. The appellant was found to have forfeited its appeal on evidentiary issues. It designated only a partial reporters transcript and then failed to include the evidentiary issue in its identification of issues to be raised on appeal in its notice of designation of record, as is required under Rule of Court 8.130(a)(2) when the whole reporters’ transcript isn’t designated. Particularly because parts of the transcript that weren’t prepared involved some of the evidentiary issues, the court finds that the appellant failed to preserve the evidentiary issues.

Affirmed.