Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-caed-2_90-cv-00520/USCOURTS-caed-2_90-cv-00520-947/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 550
Nature of Suit: Prisoner - Civil Rights (U.S. defendant)
Cause of Action: 42:1983 Prisoner Civil Rights

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UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT 

FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA 

RALPH COLEMAN, 

Plaintiff, 

v. 

GAVIN NEWSOM, et al., 

Defendants. 

No. 2:90-cv-0520 KJM DB P 

ORDER 

Defendants have filed a motion for a protective order protecting them from 

producing to the court’s neutral expert documents they claim are subject to the attorney-client 

privilege and work product doctrine. ECF No. 6086. The motion is noticed for hearing before 

the undersigned on March 22, 2019. Id. For the reasons explained in the order, the motion is 

denied without hearing. 

I. BACKGROUND 

Defendants’ motion for protective order is the latest in a series of motions and 

court proceedings that have followed the court’s receipt in October 2018 of a whistleblower 

report by defendant California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s Statewide Chief 

Psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Golding. The Golding Report was brought to the court’s attention by 

separate October 5, 2018 filings by plaintiffs and defendants, the former seeking a status 

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conference and the latter requesting a stay of proceedings. ECF Nos. 5936, 5938. The court had 

five hearings between October 10, 2018 and December 14, 2018 as part of considering options for 

addressing the allegations of the Golding Report. See ECF Nos. 5944, 5964, 5980, 5995, 6035. 

Ultimately the court also gave the parties opportunities to show cause why the court should not 

appoint an independent investigator,1 ECF No. 6002, to file their views on the court’s planned 

appointment of Charles J. Stevens, Esq. of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, ECF No. 6018, and to 

comment on the proposed content of appointment orders. ECF Nos. 6002-1, 6018-1. 

Defendants filed two responses to the court’s November 13, 2018 order to show 

cause, ECF No. 6002. ECF Nos. 6009, 6012. In the first set of objections, which were timely 

filed, defendants asserted, inter alia, that the court’s proposed order would authorize the 

independent investigator to invade attorney-client and work product protections. ECF No. 6009 

at 13-14. The second response, ECF No. 6012, was filed after the deadline set in the November 

13, 2018 order, and accompanied by a request for an extension of time to file the response. ECF 

No. 6013. In that response, defendants asserted they had “confirmed that no fraud on this Court 

has occurred.” ECF No. 6012 at 4.2

 While the court granted the extension of time and permitted 

the late filing, the court also held that it would “disregard the objections at this time as filed in 

derogation of a prior court ruling denying without prejudice defendants’ request to submit a 

substantive response to the allegations of the Golding Report prior to completion of an 

independent investigation.” ECF No. 6018 at 1-2 (citing ECF No. 5998 at 20:4-23). 

On November 29, 2018, after considering the parties’ responses to the November 

13, 2018 order to show cause, the court issued an order confirming its intention “to appoint an 

expert under Federal Rule of Evidence 706 to investigate and prepare a report for the court and 

the parties on whether there is evidence sufficient to warrant an evidentiary hearing into whether 

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 Over the course of this process, the expert has been referred to variously in court orders 

as an independent investigator, an independent expert, and a neutral expert. 

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 References to page numbers in documents filed in the Court’s Electronic Case Filing 

(ECF) system are to page numbers assigned by the ECF system and located in the upper right 

hand corner of the page. 

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defendants have intentionally presented false or misleading information to the court in one or 

more of the areas addressed in the Golding Report.” ECF No. 6018 at 2. The court again invited 

responses from the parties, this time to the court’s proposal to appoint Mr. Stevens of Gibson, 

Dunn & Crutcher LLP as the court’s independent expert. Id. at 12. 

In their December 6, 2018 response, defendants again reiterated their objection to 

the appointment of a neutral expert before the court assessed the accuracy of allegations in the 

Golding Report, ECF No. 6022 at 4-5, and their objections concerning potential invasion of the 

attorney-client privilege. Id. at 10-11. On December 13, 2018, after reviewing the parties’ 

responses to the November 29, 2018 order, the court issued an order confirming its intention to 

appoint Mr. Stevens and his firm “as its neutral expert to conduct an independent investigation 

into certain allegations in the Golding Report,” “subject to his confirmation of his consent.” ECF 

No 6032 at 1, 10. 

On December 14, 2018, the court conducted a status conference. Mr. Stevens and 

his partner Benjamin Wagner, Esq., participated in the status conference by telephone. 

Defendants again raised their attorney-client privilege objection, arguing the court had not 

responded to their objection. ECF No. 6054 at 16:2-7. The court stated its response was “in a 

single line in the order issued yesterday, and that is I'm not going to put any artificial limits on the 

investigation. The information will lead where it will.” Id. at 16:8-11. Subsequently, the 

following exchange took place between Mr. Stevens and the court: 

 

MR. STEVENS: First, and perhaps this relates to Mr. Gibson's 

comment about attorney-client privilege, I think it is clear to 

us from the court's orders that the court contemplates that we 

will at various times have access to information that is 

appropriately deemed to be privileged information pursuant to 

attorney-client privilege. 

In our view, and this is our interpretation of the 

orders, if a party provides access to attorney-client 

privileged information, that would not effectuate a waiver of 

the attorney-client privilege because we are acting as an arm 

of the court. And thus, the disclosure of privileged 

information to us would be the functional equivalent of 

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submitting privileged information to the court, under seal, for 

in camera review. 

Consistent with that, assuming that interpretation is 

right, I would confirm on the record that our intention would 

be, to the extent that we do have attorney-client information 

from any party, that we would not publicly disclose that, nor 

disclose it to the other side. And any such information that 

is flagged by the parties as privileged information would only 

be submitted to the court, under seal, for in camera review. 

And only the court would be free to decide the validity of any 

privilege claim and disclose that information. 

We are very respectful of parties' privileges and will 

do everything in our power to avoid any intentional or 

inadvertent disclosure of privileged material. 

I would just like to confirm that is a correct 

interpretation of the court's order. 

THE COURT: The court would confirm that is a correct 

interpretation, that any access provided will not operate as a 

waiver and there will be no public disclosure. 

To the extent Mr. Stevens provides any information 

covered by a privileged claim, it will be not publicly 

provided. It will be provided under seal to the court, and the 

court would ultimately, after adversarial proceedings, make any 

determination about unsealing that information if it thought it 

was required to do so. 

Id. at 25:18-27:4. 

On December 14, 2018, the court issued an order appointing Mr. Stevens and his 

firm as the court’s neutral expert under Federal Rule of Evidence 706. ECF No. 6033. The court 

issued an amended appointment order on January 8, 2019. ECF No. 6064. Defendants have 

appealed the appointment orders, although their grounds for appeal are not clear. See ECF Nos. 

6058, 6078. They have neither sought nor received a stay of the court’s orders covered by any 

appeal. 

II. ANALYSIS 

Though styled as a motion for protective order, defendants’ motion is properly 

construed as a motion for reconsideration of this court’s prior orders concerning the scope of the 

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neutral expert’s access to information for which attorney-client privilege and/or work product 

protections might be asserted and the process to be followed for production and consideration of 

such materials. Local Rule 230(j) sets out the requirements for seeking reconsideration of a court 

order: 

(j) Applications for Reconsideration. Whenever any motion has been 

granted or denied in whole or in part, and a subsequent motion for 

reconsideration is made upon the same or any alleged different set of 

facts, counsel shall present to the Judge or Magistrate Judge to whom 

such subsequent motion is made an affidavit or brief, as appropriate, 

setting forth the material facts and circumstances surrounding each 

motion for which reconsideration is sought, including: 

(1) when and to what Judge or Magistrate Judge the prior motion was 

made; 

(2) what ruling, decision, or order was made thereon; 

(3) what new or different facts or circumstances are claimed to exist 

which did not exist or were not shown upon such prior motion, or 

what other grounds exist for the motion; and 

(4) why the facts or circumstances were not shown at the time of the 

prior motion. 

Local Rule 230(j) (E.D. Cal.). Defendants have not satisfied the requirements of this rule. In 

particular, misleadingly, while defendants quote part of Mr. Stevens’ comments from the 

December 14, 2018 hearing, they do not set forth the entire exchange between the court and Mr. 

Stevens, nor do they acknowledge that the court specifically confirmed in open court, in a bench 

order, the procedure that would be followed. See ECF No. 6086 at 5. In this way, they have 

failed to meet the requirement of Local Rule 230(j)(2); similarly, they have not met the 

requirements of Local Rule 230(j)(3) or (4). 

Moreover, defendants’ request that the court conduct an advance review of 

allegedly privileged material in camera to determine whether the crime-fraud exception to the 

attorney-client privilege applies seeks an end-run around the court’s prior ruling that it would not 

consider “a substantive response to the allegations of the Golding Report prior to completion of 

an independent investigation.” ECF No. 6018 at 2 (citing ECF No. 5998 at 20:4-23). Such a 

review would require the court now to consider the question of whether there is evidence of fraud 

on the court, in advance of the report it is awaiting from its neutral expert. The defendants have it 

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backwards: Completion of the neutral expert’s work is a prerequisite to the court’s proper 

consideration and resolution of the issues raised by the Golding Report. 

As the court has explained and confirmed in prior orders, the process it has put in 

place does not delegate the court’s factfinding or decision-making authority to the neutral expert. 

Rather, the sole function of the neutral expert is 

to assist the court and the parties in determining “whether there is a 

sufficient factual foundation to require this court to hold an 

adversarial, evidentiary hearing to determine whether defendants 

have intentionally presented false or misleading evidence to the court 

or the Special Master.” ECF No. 6018 at 10. At the conclusion of 

the investigation, he will report to the court and the parties on the 

results of the investigation, providing his views on what documents 

and which witnesses, if any, support the court’s holding of an 

evidentiary hearing. See id. at 10. He will not “have any ‘dispute 

resolution authority,’ will not conduct any hearings, and will not 

make any recommendations to the court concerning adjudication of 

any facts.” Id. 

ECF No. 6032 at 6. As the court has also explained, the Golding Report requires the court to 

“fulfill its duty to ensure that the record before it is free from fraud or intentional 

misrepresentation,” and in doing so the court “must ultimately consider all the evidence relevant 

to those questions as they are raised by the Golding Report.” Id. at 4-5. To perform its function 

fairly, 

[t]he court simply cannot itself conduct the initial factual 

investigation into allegations it may adjudicate in subsequent 

adversarial proceedings. The importance in this context of a neutral 

investigation led by someone who understands what qualifies as 

actual fraud and what does not, and who also understands the way 

large and complex governmental organizations operate, cannot be 

overstated. 

Id. at 5. To ensure that the neutral investigation is carried out efficiently and fairly, as discussed 

above, the court already has addressed defendants’ concerns regarding materials for which they 

may claim attorney-client privilege or work product protection, by providing that those claims are 

not waived and potentially privileged material be disclosed only to the court’s neutral expert 

during the investigation and then to the court, subject to the claim of privilege. In light of the 

court’s prior orders, there is no basis for the protective order defendants now seek. 

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For the foregoing reasons, defendants’ motion for protective order will be denied. 

Given counsel’s selective quoting of the December 14, 2018 hearing transcript, and apparent 

disregard of the court’s prior orders regarding the procedures to be followed and the treatment of 

potentially privileged information during the independent investigation, counsel is reminded of 

the obligations imposed by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11. 

In accordance with the above, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that defendants’ 

February 14, 2019 motion for protective order, ECF No. 6086, is DENIED. The hearing set for 

March 22, 2019 is VACATED. 

DATED: February 19, 2019. 

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