Opinion ID: 844218
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Denial of Motion for Discovery of Law Enforcement Officers' Personnel Files

Text: Defendant filed a pretrial motion for disclosure of information contained in the personnel files of Deputy Blair and the arresting officersDeputies James Corrigan and Jeff Rigginconcerning any accusations that these deputies previously had committed unnecessary acts of aggressive behavior, acts of violence and/or attempted violence, [or] acts of excessive force and/or attempted excessive force. (See Pitchess v. Superior Court (1974) 11 Cal.3d 531 [113 Cal.Rptr. 897, 522 P.2d 305]; Evid. Code, §§ 1043, 1045; see also Pen. Code, §§ 832.5, 832.7, subd. (a).) The trial court conducted an in camera hearing outside the presence of the parties, at which the custodian of records for the sheriff's department, Deputy Gary Robertson of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office Internal Affairs Bureau, testified under oath and produced one potentially responsive document. The trial court found no information should be disclosed to defendant, and ordered sealed the transcript of the hearing and the document the custodian submitted to the court. On appeal, defendant raises two challenges to the denial of his motion: first, that the trial court failed to make an adequate record before ruling on the motion because it neglected to require that the custodian specify what, if any, other documents in the personnel files were deemed to be nonresponsive to the motion and therefore were not submitted to the court, and second, that the trial court erred by not disclosing to defendant the information contained in the document submitted by the custodian. We are not persuaded. Although the trial court did not ask the custodian whether there were other materials in the deputies' personnel files deemed nonresponsive to defendant's motion, and, if so, what those materials were, we conclude that in these circumstances the trial court did not err. In arguing to the contrary, defendant relies upon our statement in People v. Mooc (2001) 26 Cal.4th 1216, 1229 [114 Cal.Rptr.2d 482, 36 P.3d 21] ( Mooc ), that in the course of a hearing on a Pitchess motion, [t]he custodian should be prepared to state in chambers and for the record what other documents (or category of documents) not presented to the court were included in the complete personnel record, and why those were deemed irrelevant or otherwise nonresponsive to the defendant's Pitchess motion. The guidance we offered in Mooc does not establish that in this case the trial court committed reversible error by failing to have Deputy Robertson do so. In Mooc, we did not hold that a failure to specify what documents in a file were not brought to court would, by itself, result in an inadequate record. The problem we addressed at length in Mooc was the trial court's failure to make any record of what materials the custodian of records did bring to court, none of which the trial court ordered disclosed to the defendant. In other words, in Mooc the custodian had deemed some documents potentially responsive to the Pitchess motion, but the trial court found they were not, and appellate review of that decision was compromised because there was no record of the documents at issue. ( Mooc, supra, 26 Cal.4th at p. 1230.) (1) The circumstances of Mooc are markedly different from those in the present case, in which there is solely an absence of a statement from the custodian addressing what other documents might have been in the deputies' files that the sheriff's department deemed nonresponsive. As we acknowledged in Mooc, even if custodians of records were always ordered to bring complete personnel files for the court's reviewa requirement we explicitly rejected ( Mooc, supra, 26 Cal.4th at p. 1230)there would still be the opportunity for an unscrupulous custodian improperly to withhold responsive documents from the court's review. ( Id. at pp. 1229-1230, fn. 4.) In every case, accepting the custodian's representations concerning what is in a personnel file will be, at bottom, a credibility determination for the trial court, regardless of whether the custodian produces what purports to be the entire file in court, produces only what purport to be the potentially responsive documents, or produces what purport to be the potentially responsive documents and specifies on the record what nonresponsive documents were omitted. Moreover, in the present case, the hearing on defendant's Pitchess motion predated our guidance in Mooc concerning what steps ought to be taken to ensure an ideal record, and as to the one document produced in this case, the trial court properly summarized it at the hearing and included a sealed copy in the record on appeal. Accordingly, we cannot conclude the trial court's acceptance of Deputy Robertson's sworn representation that there was only one potentially responsive document in the deputies' files, without requiring him to identify on the record any documents that he deemed nonresponsive, made the record in the present case so inadequate that reversible statutory or constitutional error occurred. (Cf. People v. Jackson (1996) 13 Cal.4th 1164, 1221, fn. 10 [56 Cal.Rptr.2d 49, 920 P.2d 1254] [reviewing a Pitchess claim based upon the record of the in camera proceeding although the personnel documents at issue had been destroyed].) [6] And, as we acknowledged in Mooc, relief by way of a petition for a writ of habeas corpus would be available if defendant were to determine that documents improperly were withheld from the trial court, and defendant was prejudiced by the omission. ( Mooc, supra, 26 Cal.4th at pp. 1229-1230, fn. 4.) As to defendant's second claimthat the trial court erred by not disclosing information contained in the one potentially responsive documentwe have reviewed the document and the trial court's grounds for its decision, and conclude that no reversible error occurred.