McDade Shooting Reverberates in Court as Battle Over Contents of Report Heats Up

Fallout from the fatal police shooting of Kendrec McDade in 2012 reverberates in Pasadena this week as an appellate court ruling which effectively seals previously public court documents was challenged as an “unconstitutional censorship of the press” by newspaper and civil rights attorneys Thursday.

Events unfolded Wednesday as the 2nd District Court of Appeal ordered the immediate return of documents filed nine days earlier and the following day opposing attorneys challenged that order.

The documents in question were filed March 16 by attorneys representing the Pasadena Police Officers Association, Pasadena Police Officer Matthew Griffin and Officer Jeffrey Newlen and contained statements from the very report which they are seeking to restrict from public access.

Those statements are from the Office of Independent Review Group report analyzing the two police officers’ conduct during the McDade shooting incident. Almost 1-1/2 pages were quoted from that OIR report in the March 16 filing. The quotations are appraisals of the officers’ actions during the incident, which the report at one point called “troubling.”

Realizing they had publicly released material they are seeking to suppress, police union attorneys sought and obtained the appellate order requiring the immediate return of the March 16 filing document. Attorneys representing the officers said they had “inadvertently, and mistakenly, included verbatim excerpts” from the OIR report.

The appellate court granted the police union’s request.

Newspaper and civil rights attorneys seeking the full release of the report, whose earlier arguments convinced Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant to rule that the majority of the OIR report must be publicly disclosed under California’s Public Records Act, challenged Wednesday’s court order sealing the union’s filing.

“The genie cannot be put back in the bottle,” Pasadena civil rights attorney Skip Hickambottom said Thursday. “The Court of Appeal clearly fumbled by issuing the order. This Court of Appeal obviously did not realize that its order is unconstitutional.”

Separately, a coalition of media and 1st Amendment organizations including the Associated Press and the New York Times asked to be heard in the case and urged the court to reverse its sealing order, the Los Angeles Times reported.