The Supreme Court today held that a news organization can obtain copies of all citations issued by the Department of Public Health to state-owned long-term health care facilities that the organization was investigating for mistreatment of mentally ill and developmentally disabled persons, subject to redaction of patient or resident names. The opinion — in State Department of Public Health v. Superior Court — was unanimous and authored by Justice Goodwin Liu. The court reverses the Third District Court of Appeal.
The court’s opinion is about statutory interpretation, specifically addressing a conflict between the Long-Term Care, Health, Safety, and Security Act of 1973 and a provision in the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act. Actually, the main issue was whether there is a conflict or whether the statutes can be harmonized. The court concluded there is a conflict and applied the rule of the Long-Term Care Act because it is “both the more specific and the later-enacted statute.” The statutes could not be harmonized, as the Court of Appeal had attempted. The Supreme Court stated, “the requirement that courts harmonize potentially inconsistent statutes when possible is not a license to redraft the statutes to strike a compromise that the Legislature did not reach.”
