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Court of Appeal:
Public Records Can’t Be Subject of Nondisclosure Order
By a MetNews Staff Writer
The Court of Appeal for this district held in an opinion certified for publication yesterday that Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mike Camacho was without authority to order lawyers for the accused in a murder case not to disclose records of a police officer’s misconduct to anyone not connected with the defense team.
Those records, concerning a sustained allegation of dishonesty against Azusa police officer Jonathan Rush, are subject to public disclosure under the California Public Records Act (“CPRA”), Justice Victor Viramontes of Div. Eight said in an opinion initially filed on Oct. 25. That renders the protective order infirm, he wrote, in an opinion directing issuance of a writ of mandate.
Effective Jan. 1, 2019, Viramontes pointed out, Penal Code §832.7(b) has provided that certain “peace officer or custodial officer personnel records and records maintained by a state or local agency shall not be confidential and shall be made available for public inspection” under the CPRA. Included is:
“Any record relating to an incident in which a sustained finding was made by any law enforcement agency or oversight agency involving dishonesty by a peace officer or custodial officer directly relating to the reporting, investigation, or prosecution of a crime, or directly relating to the reporting of, or investigation of misconduct by, another peace officer or custodial officer, including, but not limited to, any false statements, filing false reports, destruction, falsifying, or concealing of evidence, or perjury.”
Camacho issued the protective order after reviewing the officer’s file in chambers. Materials were sought by the defense pursuant both to a CPRA request and a Pitchess motion.
Nonconfidential Records
Viramontes noted that Camacho’s “September 2023 protective order consists only of records concerning the Department’s sustained finding of dishonesty against Officer Rush” which are, he said, “nonconfidential and subject to public inspection.”
The jurist declared: “Because the court did not order the Department to disclose any confidential information from Officer Rush’s personnel records, it should not have issued a protective order precluding defense counsel from sharing the records of Officer Rush’s sustained finding of dishonesty with anyone outside of the team working on Banuelos’s defense. We therefore direct the court to vacate its protective order concerning those records.”
Petition Initially Denied
The writ petition, filed by defendant Manuel Banuelos, was summarily denied by Div. Eight on Dec. 28, 2023. Review was sought in the California Supreme Court.
In a reply to an answer to the petition, Deputy Los Angeles County Public Defender Lisa Zimmerman argued:
“SB 1421 was enacted to increase transparency and increase public access to records of peace officer misconduct….Protective orders should not be used as a tool to thwart this legislative mandate and prohibit the dissemination of nonconfidential records of peace officer misconduct which are being produced in response to an existing CPRA request.” A footnote in her brief contains this allegation:
“After Penal Code section 832.7 was amended, some law enforcement agencies went to great lengths to block or delay the release of public records of police misconduct. Some agencies have destroyed files, withheld records, charged high fees to release records, or delayed disclosure of records.”
The California Supreme Court granted review on March 20, 2024, bouncing the case back to Div. Eight “with directions to vacate its order denying mandate and to issue an order directing respondent superior court to show cause why the relief sought in the petition should not be granted.”
Rush and the department filed letter briefs in which they announced they were taking no position on the merits of Banuelos’s contention. After Viramontes’s opinion was filed, Banuelos requested that it be published, and the justices obliged yesterday.
The case is Banuelos v. Superior Court (Azusa Police Department), B333189.
Banuelos is accused of beating a man to death with a baseball bat.
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