Judge struggles to keep track of California’s many prison rape cases

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is facing so many sexual assault claims a judge said she is having trouble keeping track of them.

“Frankly, as I think about it today, it would be helpful to have a list that includes all the matters included in a page somewhere,” Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Lauri A. Damrell said at the beginning of a case management conference on Friday. CDCR Women’s Facilities Cases, JCCP5276 (Sac. Super. Ct., filed April 26, 2023).

She later added, “This is an exceptionally unusual case in that we are handling hundreds of matters.”

Damrell and the attorneys present barely touched on her tentative ruling on Thursday ordering that 224 separate civil cases be coordinated. While some of the plaintiffs have very different claims about where and by whom they were assaulted, the judge wrote that the “efficient utilization of judicial facilities and manpower” demanded the cases proceed together.

“As the court has previously noted, it remains unclear that there is a common question of fact or law in these cases,” Damrell wrote in her tentative ruling. “However, coordination may still be appropriate notwithstanding a lack of commonality.”

She also cited factors favoring coordination, including “efficient utilization of judicial facilities and manpower” and “the disadvantages of duplicative and inconsistent rulings, orders, or judgments,” and “the likelihood of settlement” as factors favoring coordination.

“I’m certainly aware of the budget issues with the state,” Damrell told the attorneys on Friday.

Like other institutions that have been flooding with years-old claims in recent years, the stream of new cases against the prisons came at least partly because of a change in state law. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 1455 in 2021. It resolved a conflict between the statutes of limitations, clarifying that current and former prisoners could bring civil sexual assault claims without being barred by the shorter limits under California’s Government Claims Act.

Hundreds of claims followed. Many of these came out of two prisons, the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla and the California Institution for Women in Chino. Attorneys for plaintiffs claim there was a longstanding culture that allowed some guards to get away with raping prisoners for years.

Many of these claims were brought by Slater, Slater & Schulman LLP, a New York firm that is also part of a mass claim of sexual abuse against the Boy Scouts of America. Damrell asked Kyle Gaines, a senior associate with the firm appearing by videoconference, to update a master list of the cases the firm has been maintaining. Six of the 10 pages of Damrell’s tentative ruling were taken up by lists of Jane Doe case numbers.

“Our case management system we use in normal cases I don’t think is going to be sufficient here,” Damrell told the attorneys. “We continue to see cases here that have not been added to the JCCP matter.”

On March 6, Slate partner James W. Lewis and Diana Esquivel filed a joint petition to add new cases to the matter in Damrell’s court. Exhibit A of that filing was a six-page spreadsheet of Jane Doe claims filed through January.

Damrell briefly questioned Esquivel about another, smaller set of claims against the Department of Corrections filed in federal court.

“I think they are primarily focused on 1983 claims, not the state law claims,” Esquivel said, citing the federal law covering police misconduct.