The U.S. Supreme Court denied without dissent or further comments a State of California motion to dismiss a San Quentin-related Covid lawsuit, which allowed lawsuits against the state to proceed.
The state faced four major lawsuits filed by families of San Quentin staff and incarcerated persons who had died of Covid and by survivors of the Covid ordeal, according to David G. Savage of the Los Angeles Times. The May 13 decision by the nation’s highest court would now take plaintiffs a step closer to a resolution.
“The state has had its due process all the way to the Supreme Court. They’re not getting off on a technicality,” attorney Michael J. Haddad told the Times. “Now it’s time to face the facts. Prison administrators killed 29 people in what the Ninth Circuit called a ‘textbook case’ of deliberate indifference.”
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision left intact a lower court decision written in 2023 by Circuit Judge Michelle T. Friedland of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Polanco v. Diaz 76 F.4th 918.
According to court documents obtained by San Quentin News, a recent June 27 order by U.S. District Court Judge Edward J. Davila of the Northern District of California said the Court would likely “refer the related actions to Judge Cisneros for discovery issues and to Judge Illman and Judge Beeler for settlement discussions.”
Regarding San Quentin residents, Judge Davila ordered three important actions. First, “With respect to pro se plaintiffs [San Quentin residents who filed Covid-related suits] in the related actions, the Court noted that it and the parties will have to ensure that such plaintiffs are notified of the class action and the option to become a member of the class.”
Second, the court documents said, “It will additionally be necessary to ascertain the locations of any plaintiffs who were formally incarcerated and are now on parole or probation.”
“Lastly, the Court noted the need to ensure that hearings and other proceedings are conducted in a manner that provides incarcerated plaintiffs with access to court proceedings,” said the court documents.
A search of the case in the legal database LexisNexis revealed that “Polanco” referred to Sergeant Gilbert Polanco, the San Quentin staff member who had died from Covid, and to the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Patricia, Vincent, and Selena Polanco, his surviving family. “Diaz” referred to Ralph Diaz, the then-secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
A synopsis of the case as shown on LexisNexis told a tale of good intentions gone awry. The state intended to protect inmates with high-risk medical conditions from Covid and transferred 122 of them from Chino, which had a severe Covid outbreak, to an institution without any known cases of Covid — San Quentin. The state did so “without properly testing or screening them, [without] revising the plan when they fell ill on the buses, or [without] quarantining them upon their arrival.”
“The transfer exposed a discrete group, prison guards and inmates, exposure to COVID-19 in a pre-vaccine world constituted a danger, and the official made no attempt to mitigate the risk, thereby establishing deliberate indifference,” the summary continued. The transfers led to rapid spread of the virus, infecting 75% of the residents and resulting in the deaths of 28 residents and one correctional officer — Polanco.
Polanco v. Diaz concerned the question of whether the legal doctrine of “qualified immunity” applied to the state’s dealings with the crisis and the resulting deaths. Judge Friedland had written “… the officials were not entitled to qualified immunity as case law concerning state-created danger doctrine put them on notice of their potential liability for exposing employees to workplace conditions that they knew were likely to cause serious illness.”
Circuit Judge Ryan D. Nelson had written a dissenting view: “In May, 2020, the science on the virus was far from settled, including best practices for combatting the virus. Prison officials at San Quentin State Prison and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation faced a difficult task – managing prison affairs amid global chaos.
“Even if the complaint alleges a constitutional violation, as the majority holds, it is not one that was clearly established at the time – a time which, it bears repeating, was during one of the most novel and disruptive pandemics in a century. Hindsight is 20/20, and we cannot view the clearly established inquiry through the lens of what we know or believe to be true now,” Judge Nelson’s dissent stated.
