Here are some highlights from yesterday’s Supreme Court conference:
Clemency approval: Supreme Court approves another gubernatorial commutation of an LWOP sentence.
Confidential medical records: The court granted review in J.M. v. Illuminate Education. The Second District, Division Six, Court of Appeal published opinion reinstated a class action, dismissed on demurrer, alleging the defendant education consulting business violated California’s Confidentiality of Medical Information Act and Customer Records Act by negligently failing to protect its data against a hack that obtained student personal and medical information the business had obtained from the lead plaintiff’s school. The business, which got the private information to assist the school and evaluate the student’s educational progress, also allegedly delayed for five months before giving notice of the data breach. Division Six held the business is covered by the CMIA, which applies to, among others, “[a]ny business organized for the purpose of maintaining medical information in order to make the information available to an individual or to a provider of health care at the request of the individual or a provider of health care, for purposes of allowing the individual to manage the individual’s information, or for the diagnosis and treatment of the individual.” It also concluded that the lawsuit’s “allegations demonstrate the type of harm the Legislature sought to prevent in enacting the CMIA–negligence causing a data breach that exposed confidential information to cyber hackers.” The appellate court additionally found the allegations stated a valid cause of action under the CRA.
[November 1 update: Here is the issue as summarized by court staff — “Is a company that stores students’ confidential personal and medical information through its work providing software to school districts subject to liability to these students under the Confidentiality of Medical Information Act (Civ. Code, § 56 et seq.) and the Customer Records Act (Civ. Code, § 1798.80 et seq.) following disclosure of such information through a data breach?”]
Revived sex assault claims against public entities dissenting vote. Over Justice Joshua Groban’s recorded dissenting vote, the court denied review in West Contra Costa Unified School District v. Superior Court, a writ petition arising from a case in which the plaintiff alleges she was sexually assaulted by her high school counselor between 1979 and 1983. The First District, Division Five, published opinion rejected constitutional challenges to 2019’s Assembly Bill 218, legislation described by the appellate court as having “provided a three-year window within which plaintiffs were permitted to bring childhood sexual assault claims against public entities that would otherwise be barred because of statutes of limitations or claim presentation requirements.” The school district claimed that, by retroactively eliminating the claim presentation requirement, the statute violated the California Constitution’s provision barring the Legislature from making “any gift” to an individual and also the federal and state constitutional due process clauses. Division Five held there was no “gift clause” violation: “waiver of the claim presentation requirement did not constitute an expenditure of public funds that may be considered a ‘gift’ because AB 218 did not create new ‘substantive liability’ [citation] for the underlying alleged wrongful conduct,” but instead “AB 218 simply waived a condition the state had imposed on its consent to suit.” The due process arguments were rejected because, the appellate court concluded, the school district, as a subordinate political entity and creature of the State, didn’t have standing to challenge the State’s enactment of AB 218. Horvitz & Levy was appellate counsel for the School District and filed the petition for review.
Traffic-stop-search dissenting vote. Justice Groban also recorded a dissenting vote from the denial of review in People v. Ramirez. The Fourth District, Division Three, published opinion reversed the suppression of evidence (a handgun and cocaine) seen in a car during a traffic stop — for the defendant driver’s failure to make a complete stop at a stop sign — after a police officer ordered the driver out of the auto. The appellate court reviewed officer body camera video and concluded there were no Fourth Amendment violations. The officer “was permitted to order Ramirez ‘to exit the vehicle without any articulable justification,’ ” Division Three wrote, adding that the officer’s “intent or motives for his actions—even if they were pretextual—are irrelevant.” The opinion first chided the appellant district attorney for accusing the trial judge of “ ‘fabricat[ing]’ a legal theory,” language the court said is “subject to misinterpretation and [is] unacceptable.”
More dissenting votes. Justices Goodwin Liu and Kelli Evans recorded dissenting votes from the denial of review in Miller v. Superior Court. The denial follows the Fourth District, Division Three, summary denial of a writ petition. The Supreme Court and Court of Appeal dockets don’t indicate what the case is about nor have we been able to obtain a copy of the petition for review.
[November 27 update: Having now looked at the petition for review, we know that the writ proceeding raised issues under the California Racial Justice Act (here and here). The superior court had rejected the defendant’s claims that RJA violations were established by a “statistical report of racial disparity in the charging of robbery and burglary special circumstances” and by the prosecution’s written statement in opposition to a pretrial motion that “Black individual can commit different types of murder than White individuals.”]
Criminal case grant-and-hold. There was just one criminal case grant-and-hold, another case waiting for a decision in People v. Rhodius (see here).
Another Turrieta grant-and-hold disposition (see here). The court dismissed review in Morales v. Garfield Beach CVS, which had been one of several grant-and-hold cases waiting for the August decision in Turrieta v. Lyft, Inc. (2024) 16 Cal.5th 664 about intervention in Private Attorneys General Act actions in (see here).
