Federal judge orders contempt hearing over L.A. County’s failure to clean up its jails

Lawyers for Los Angeles County admitted Wednesday that officials had not complied with an injunction ordering them to clean up the jails, but a visibly annoyed federal judge agreed to wait two more months before deciding whether to find the sheriff and county supervisors in contempt of court.

“You’re on full notice that what will be coming up in 60 days is a contempt hearing,” U.S. District Judge Dean D. Pregerson told the county’s legal team after hearing nearly four hours of updates on the state of Los Angeles jails.

This week’s court date addressed developments in three long-standing federal lawsuits, none of which seem to be going well for the county. In addition to planning a contempt hearing in the oldest of those cases, the judge also hinted that he’d be open to considering contempt in another case — a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice that accuses the county of providing unconstitutionally bad mental health care behind bars.

Over the course of the proceedings, Pregerson interjected often, sometimes cutting off the county’s attorneys with clear annoyance or weary questions.

At one point, a lawyer for the county suggested the judge should consider visiting the jails again as he had before, this time to see the improvements and better understand the roadblocks to faster change.

“We’ll roll out the red carpet,” attorney Robert Dugdale said.

Without a hint of mirth, Pregerson replied: “I don’t want the red carpet, and when I saw it initially, it was horrible.”

The case that led to Wednesday’s plans for a contempt hearing was originally filed in 1975. It alleged that conditions in the county’s jails violated the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The case went to trial, and eventually a federal judge ordered a series of improvements, which the county has yet to fully carry out.

In recent years, much of the court’s attention has been on conditions in the Inmate Reception Center, where men who’ve just been arrested are sent for booking. Most of the inmates there have not yet been convicted of a crime, and the facility isn’t intended to hold people for extended periods.

In sworn statements, detainees have reported living in filth and not being given needed psychiatric medication. According to the American Civil Liberties Union — which is representing the inmates — people in the reception center have been routinely chained to benches or gurneys for more than 24 hours at a time, regularly locked in unsanitary cells and made to sleep on urine-stained floors.

Last year, Pregerson ordered the county to make modest improvements, such as no longer chaining mentally ill people to benches for more than four hours, no longer leaving inmates in areas without drinking water or working toilets and no longer keeping people in the Inmate Reception Center for more than a day.

In February, the ACLU asked the court to hold the county in contempt, alleging that officials had failed to make those improvements and had simply begun tethering people to gurneys instead of benches.

But Dugdale said Wednesday that the county had since made some progress on meeting those benchmarks — despite setbacks in February that he blamed on staffing problems. Starting next week, he said, the jail will have a sergeant dedicated to tracking how long people are being held in the reception center and making sure that data provided to the ACLU are accurate.

Neither the court nor the inmates’ lawyers seemed impressed.

“The legal standard for contempt is not, ‘We did some stuff so we’re not liable,’” ACLU attorney Corene Kendrick said.

Ultimately, Pregerson directed both legal teams to prepare for a contempt hearing with testimony from four witnesses on each side, though the court did not immediately set a date.

Pregerson also hinted at the possibility of other such proceedings in the future. During an update on the Justice Department’s lawsuit, the judge twice suggested that the department’s next step might be to ask him to hold the county in contempt.

For the last few months, much of the legal action in the Justice Department case has focused on a disagreement about how long the county needs to comply with certain provisions of a settlement agreement it promised to comply with years ago.

Of the dozens of provisions in the agreement, the one that’s proved to be the biggest point of contention requires jailers to let severely mentally ill inmates out of solitary confinement for at least 20 hours a week.

Lawyers for the county said that will take more than two years to accomplish.

But in response to a question from Pregerson, Justice Department lawyer Matthew Nickell confirmed it is “likely” they would ask for a contempt ruling if the county doesn’t agree to tighter deadlines.

Nickell also pointed out that if the county had actually decreased the population enough to close Men’s Central Jail as previously planned, they’d already be able to provide adequate care for those still behind bars.

He described Men’s Central Jail as “uninhabitable” for “virtually everyone,” but said “the county continues to house mentally ill individuals there.”

In addition to hearing about the poor jail conditions and lack of mental health care, the court also heard an update on a third major lawsuit focused on violence meted out by deputies.

That case, Rosas vs. Luna, stemmed from a class-action lawsuit that led to a settlement agreement in 2015. Eight years later, ACLU lawyers say the Sheriff’s Department has made good progress meeting many of the provisions outlined in that agreement.

But, the attorneys said, deputies are still frequently punching inmates in the head and officials are rarely disciplining them for that or other violence.

Though the ACLU proposed creating mandatory punishments for deputies who commit certain violations — such as lying in reports to cover up uses of force — an attorney for the county said there was “very little chance” the county would agree to that.

The judge openly questioned whether the county was actually reporting all use of force incidents and ultimately gave both sides six weeks to agree on a plan to move forward.