SAN DIEGO (CN) — The family of a pregnant woman who died alone on the floor of a San Diego County jail five years ago will soon be able to share video footage taken at the time of her death, and other previously confidential documents, after a federal judge on Friday approved the family’s motion to unseal those records.
Eugene Iredale, one of the attorneys for the family of Elisa Serna, argued that the videos and documents should be released because the public has a right to know how public money is spent in county jails and how public officials behave.
Serna was booked into Las Colinas Detention and Reentry Facility, San Diego’s women’s jail, in 2019 on suspicion of theft and drug charges. She suffered from drug withdrawal in custody and complained of vomiting, nausea and fainting. An investigation by the San Diego County Citizens’ Law Enforcement Review Board released in 2021 found that Serna had pneumonia and was dehydrated.
Five days after she was arrested, Serna hit her head against the wall of her cell as she collapsed after a seizure. She was left alone and found dead on the floor of her cell an hour later.
Both the physician on duty at the jail and a nurse were criminally charged, but a jury deadlocked on involuntary manslaughter charges against the doctor. Prosecutors then asked the judge in the case to dismiss the charges against the nurse in February.
The Serna family is pursuing a civil lawsuit in federal court against San Diego County and a number of other defendants, including the doctor, Dr. Friederike Von Lintig, and the nurse, Danalee Pascua, over claims of deliberate indifference to medical needs, negligence, failure to properly train, failure to properly supervise and discipline, and wrongful death, among others. The family is seeking damages.
Some videos of Serna on the day of her death in her cell were presented at the criminal trial, but the defense put them under seal to prevent them from being released to the public and the media.
The defense argued that after the criminal trial, Pascua was granted a motion to seal parts of her criminal records, and that order itself is sealed. The defense also claimed the video footage was sensational and possibly damaging to Serna’s young daughter, and that the trove of documents the family asked to be released includes records that could violate the privacy of other people, like Serna’s husband.
“I’m not being cocky, but, you know, stay in your lane,” said Senior Judge U.S. District Court Judge Larry Burns, a George W. Bush appointee, about the lower court’s order.
Burns said he wouldn’t ask the defendants to personally hand over any documents that violate the lower court’s order, because the Serna family was asking to release evidence they already have.
As for the privacy concerns, the Serna family already waived their own confidentiality rights.
Serna’s husband, who was at one time a plaintiff in the case, isn’t one anymore, Iredale said.
The videos and documents are not the property of either the plaintiffs or the defendants; they’re records belonging to the public court, and therefore should be made available to the public, added Timothy Blood, an attorney for the San Diego Union-Tribune and KFMB-TV, which were added on as intervenors on Friday, as well.
There’s a long line of case law that points towards a strong presumption that the public should have access to information such as that asked for by the Serna family, Burns said. That placed a high bar for the defense to reach to argue why the records shouldn’t be released, a bar that they did not overcome, he continued.
“People want to know that the court system is functioning correctly,” Burns said before delivering his bench ruling in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. “People want to have faith and confidence that the justice system is functioning correctly.”
Burns declined to release reports from the San Diego County Sheriff's Department’s Critical Incident Review Board, an internal oversight body that investigates inmate injuries and deaths, while the Ninth Circuit hears a case revolving around whether those reports can be made public or not.
Iredale said that they will wait to release videos and other documents that Burns ordered unsealed until the court issues an official order.
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