California

A California ballot initiative to raise the cap on medical malpractice damages for pain and suffering was defeated, the Associated Press' Michael R. Blood reports. The battle over the initiative resulted in $60 million in donations and was the most expensive campaign in the state. If enacted, it would have raised the cap from $250,000 to $1.1 million.

The initiative also attracted national attention because it would have imposed random substance abuse tests on doctors.

California Governor Jerry Brown has vetoed a bill that would have allowed judges to inform juries when a prosecutor has intentionally withheld evidence, according to the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, sponsor of the bill, said in a statement "we need this bill to stop the few prosecutors whose zeal for convictions lead them to cut corners on justice. We can’t wait decades to free the innocent while the true perpetrators run free.” Brown said he was vetoing the bill because it would intrude upon the judiciary's role in instructing juries.

U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney has ruled that decades-long delays in carrying out the death penalty sentence of an inmate violates the U.S. Constitution's ban on cruel or unusual punishment, the Los Angeles Times reports. Whether the ruling will be upheld on appeal is uncertain. "'I think it has a shot in the 9th Circuit, but I don't know about the U.S. Supreme Court,'" Gerald Uelmen, a Santa Clara University law professor and who was chairman of a "state commission that concluded the system needed substantially more money to operate effectively," told the LA Times. '"It is conceivable that the U.S. Supreme Court and the 9th Circuit could say California is such an outlier — its system is so dysfunctional, with twice the national delay — that it cannot be sustained,"' Uelmen added.

 

California has enacted a law to make it easier for the wrongfully convicted to get compensation for the time they spent imprisoned, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported. Under a prior statute, defendants who were let go had to prove their innocence before they could get compensated for their wrongful imprisonment. Only 11 of 132 people released from California prisons since 2000 because they were wrongfully convicted were able to get compensation through the prior system, according to the Union-Tribune.

Drug and Device Blog reports on a California Court of Appeal decision in which an intermediate appellate panel held that the California Confidentiality of Medical Information Act does not allow for plaintiffs to sue over the negligent maintenance of their confidential medical information unless their information was accessed wrongfully or without authorization.

In the underlying case, a doctor took home a hard drive containing the personal health information for 16,000 patients. The hard drive, as well as the encryption passcodes, were stolen, but no one knows if the thief viewed or tried to view the patients' personal health information.

Drug and Device Blog said the case has "broad appeal because the fact pattern is so typical of 'data security breach' lawsuits: Private information resides on a stolen hard drive or is sent off into the ether with nary an indication that anyone received, reviewed, used, or otherwise paid any attention to the information. At another level, such lawsuits (which are usually class actions) almost never articulate any credible basis that the plaintiffs suffered any actual harm."

Reuters reports: "California Governor Jerry Brown signed a law on Thursday to give journalists in the state five days' notice before government agencies serve subpoenas on their records held by third parties, such as phone companies and internet service providers."

California has passed a law to criminalize, as a misdemeanor, posting "identifiable nude pictures of someone else online without permission with the intent to cause emotional distress or humiliation," The Guardian reports. The ACLU opposed the legislation on free-speech grounds.

California has beautiful weather and environs, which has led the growth of destination facilities for people seeking treatment for alcohol and other drug addictions. But that also has led to California localities enacting zoning rules to clamp down on such facilities. Last week, the Ninth Circuit reversed summary judgment in favor of  Newport Beach over that locality's zoning rules designed to inhibit those facilities, the OC Weekly reported. "There is direct or circumstantial evidence that [city officials] acted with a discriminatory purpose and has caused harm to member of a protected class [and] such evidence is sufficient to permit the protected individuals to proceed to trial,"' the OC Weekly reported from the opinion summary.

Treatment Magazine commented: "Last week's ruling should give pause to nearby jurisdictions from Malibu down the coast to neighboring Costa Mesa, many of which have been considering ways to restrict what admittedly has been rampant growth of Six-Bed Model treatment centers, as well as sober living operations, over the last 20 years up and down the California coastline. That growth has made Southern California a close second in size to South Florida as the nation's largest 'destination' addiction treatment services marketplace with clientele descending from all corners." The full piece is here: http://www.treatmentmagazine.com/newswires/432-california-appeals-court-...

(Thanks to Laura Elliott-Engel, my super fabulous mother and president of the board of Friends of Recovery New York to alerting me to the opinion.)

The New York Times has a report on a putatative class action filed against a Nevada psychiatric center alleging it had the practice of putting patients with mental illness onto buses to San Francisco and other California locales with one-way tickets. “In San Francisco, it’s been urban myth for decades that this sort of practice was going on,” San Franciso City Attorney Dennis Herrera told the New York Times and who is prosecuting the lawsuit. “But this is the first instance that I am aware of where we have been able to document a state-supported and state-sanctioned effort.”