When Kelly Martinez was running for sheriff in 2022, she told San Diego County voters she would remake the sprawling law enforcement agency by, among other things, releasing records of internal investigations into deaths inside local jails.
Public release of full reports from the department’s Critical Incident Review Board, or CIRB, “will occur in the near future,” she said at the time.
Soon after being sworn in, however, Martinez changed her mind.
Instead of releasing reports from the CIRB, a group of top commanders that meets regularly to evaluate allegations of deputy misconduct, potential lawsuits and other threats, the sheriff decided to post only brief summaries of the board findings.
Yet a growing chorus is calling for her to make the documents public.
In recent years, the county Citizens’ Law Enforcement Review Board, the California State Auditor, a majority of state lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom all have said the jail-death investigative records should be publicly released.
Newsom went so far as to sign Senate Bill 519 into law, legislation introduced by state Sen. Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, saying the materials must be made available for public inspection as of July 1, 2024.
Martinez has yet to release any of the actual documents produced by the Critical Incident Review Board. And critics have not been shy about challenging her handling of the records.
“I am troubled by Sheriff Martinez’s and the county’s ongoing efforts to keep CIRB documents from the public,” said attorney Timothy Blood, who represents The San Diego Union-Tribune and other news organizations in a case seeking to force disclosure of the records.
“It shows a lack of true desire to reform San Diego’s jails and an ongoing willingness to waste taxpayers’ money to hide the Sheriff’s Department misconduct,” he said.
The new state law only regards CIRB investigations into jail deaths — not the myriad other issues and situations that are presented to the for evaluation, potential policy changes or possible discipline.
Martinez was a 37-year department veteran when she was elected to a six-year term of the officially nonpartisan office in 2022. She is a former Republican who ed as a Democrat in 2020, just before longtime Sheriff Bill Gore named her undersheriff and announced he would not seek re-election.
As one of the biggest law enforcement agencies west of the Mississippi River, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department attracts a lot of attention — and grapples with many complaints, lawsuits and other accusations.
It employs more than 4,000 people and is responsible for policing approximately 4,200 square miles. It also runs seven jails that house about 4,000 people on any given day and protects county courthouses in San Diego, Vista, El Cajon and Chula Vista.
This past week, the Sheriff’s Department declined to release any documents requested by the Union-Tribune under the Atkins law. Neither the sheriff nor her staff responded to questions about why they are still not releasing CIRB records and why she changed her position on the issue.
None of the five of the county Board of Supervisors, the elected officials responsible for approving the sheriff’s $1.2 billion budget and paying its millions of dollars in settlements and jury awards, would discuss the department’s failure to meet the of the new disclosure law.
All five supervisors’ spokespersons declined to respond to questions last week.
Atkins said she is troubled by Martinez’s position related to jail-death records.
“The intent of SB 519 was clear: to give families the transparency they deserve and provide enough oversight so that the county can work to reduce further deaths,” she said. “I am deeply disappointed and concerned that the county is not providing the reporting required by law.”
CIRB records have become a key part of plaintiffs’ civil lawsuits against the county, because they outline specific acts of negligence or misconduct, civil rights attorneys who have reviewed the documents say.
Several attorneys said the records have proved critical to winning their cases.
San Diego County lawyers defending wrongful-death lawsuits and other civil litigation have argued in court that they were not obliged to turn over CIRB reports on jail deaths before Monday, when the Atkins law took full effect. It remains unclear whether the County Counsel’s Office plans to release documents on jail deaths that happened prior to July 1.
But the senator said there is no question that all of the death records are now subject to public release.
“The bill delayed implementation to July 1, 2024, to give law enforcement agencies time to comply, not to screen out records that were generated before that date or to prevent release of those records after the operative date,” she said.
“The county should remedy this grave error and provide the records they are legally bound to disclose.”
Atkins, who announced in January that she is running for California governor, said the reference to July 1 in her law “by no means suggests that records should not be released before the operative date,” in a Sept. 14, 2023, letter in the Senate Daily Journal, the official record of proceedings in the state’s upper legislative body.
The competing legal interpretations over whether the law applies retroactively or to jail deaths going forward have yet to be decided by a court.
In prior disputes over the internal documents, judges overseeing lawsuits against San Diego County have been siding with attorneys representing incarcerated people and their survivors.
“While strictly speaking, the California statute may not apply retroactively, the documents show clear legislative intent to provide additional transparency and oversight over in-custody deaths,” U.S. District Court Judge Ruth Bermudez Montenegro wrote in a May 28 ruling.
The sheriff’s CIRB findings have become a flashpoint in recent years as negligence and wrongful-death lawsuits against San Diego County have piled up.
Attorneys for plaintiffs have repeatedly requested the records as part of the discovery process leading up to trials. County lawyers have released portions of the documents — often with key parts redacted — but almost always insist that the documents remain sealed from public view.
Earlier this year, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the county’s request to withhold CIRB reports from a group of civil-rights lawyers suing the county over its jail practices.
“Petitioner has not demonstrated a clear and indisputable right to the extraordinary remedy of mandamus,” the court wrote in a Feb. 28 decision. “Accordingly, the petition is denied.”
Last year, even after San Diego County agreed to pay almost $8 million to settle a lawsuit filed by a man named Frankie Greer, lawyers defending the sheriff petitioned the judge to keep the internal records from the public.
Greer is an Army veteran, musician and mechanical engineer who was arrested in 2018 and sentenced to jail. He was assigned to a top bunk even though he had a medically diagnosed seizure disorder.
Jail officials denied Greer his prescribed medication and failed to provide a satisfactory alternative, his lawyers said. He suffered another seizure in his cell and tumbled from the bunk bed, striking his head on the concrete floor and suffering major brain trauma.
As part of the court case, Greer’s lawyers requested a series of CIRB reports they suspected would show a pattern of negligence and misconduct committed by deputies inside the county’s jails.
The internal records they sought related to 12 separate cases in which people died or sustained serious injuries in custody.
San Diego County lawyers have been fighting in court to keep CIRB findings secret for years.
Among other arguments, the county has said the reports are protected by attorney-client privilege. But a longtime Sheriff’s Department commander who attended CIRB meetings for years told the court he had never been told the findings were private.
After the judge ruled that Greer’s lawyers were entitled to the CIRB reports examining the 12 cases, the county took that case to federal appeals court and lost.
The documents were eventually turned over to the Greer legal team. Not long after, the county agreed to settle the case for $7.75 million.
After the Greer case was resolved last year, the Union-Tribune and two other news organizations intervened in the case, seeking to unseal the documents. The district court ordered the records to be publicly released.
“There are valid and compelling reasons for the public to be informed about conditions inside the county jails,” Judge Jinsook Ohta ruled. “The public has an interest in those documents.”
But instead of disclosing the records, the county appealed again to the 9th Circuit and was granted approval to argue the case.
The hearing on that dispute is scheduled next month; a final ruling will be issued sometime later.
