Judge mutes bid to punish attorneys for video release
He rules body-cam video should not have been confidential.
SANTA CLARA >> A federal judge denied the City of Santa Clara’s bid to severely punish a pair of attorneys who won a $6.7 million excessive-force settlement after they released damaging police bodycamera video against a court order, ruling that the video should never have been shielded from public view.
Magistrate Judge Nathaniel Cousins, however, ordered Oakland-based attorneys Michael Haddad and Julia Sherwin to pay about $70,000 in legal fees to the city and a group of Santa Clara police officers. The order stemmed from a civil-rights lawsuit filed by a San Jose woman whose leg was broken when she tried to prevent them from entering her home without a warrant to arrest her teenage daughter in 2016.
Cousins rejected the city’s assertions that the attorneys should be held in civil contempt, forfeit their portion of the multi-million dollar settlement reached last fall, be disciplined by the American Bar Association, and be forced to pay out additional monetary sanctions.
The legal fees were limited to the cost of the city seeking penalties for Haddad and Sherwin for releasing the video, which the attorneys acknowledged was based on an errant assessment. But in his decision, signed last month, Cousins wrote that their attempts to vet the video’s confidential status “were woefully inadequate to the point of negligence.”
“Unfortunately, this mistake happened and it was connected with one of the largest settlements we ever had,” Haddad said, adding that the oversight was an anomaly for his firm. “But fundamentally, the video should never have been confidential in the first place. People in the city and the
police department were angry about the size of the settlement and embarrassed about the publicity around it.”
Cousins granted Haddad’s related motion to remove the video’s protected status, which effectively negated most of the sanctions sought by the city.
“Because the public’s interest in the video’s disclosure outweighs any risk of harm, the court grants (the plaintiff’s) motion to remove the video’s confidentiality designation,” Cousins wrote.
In refraining from imposing additional sanctions against the attorneys, Cousins wrote that “Haddad and Sherwin have rightly met with embarrassment and strife from their imprudent behavior, and the court is optimistic that this will deter future misconduct.”
The police body-camera video, recorded April 12, 2016, showed plaintiff Danielle Burfine — whose last name was Harmon when the suit was filed — refusing to let Santa Clara police officers into her Rose Garden home to arrest her teenage daughter in connection with an earlier snackshack arson at Santa Clara High School. The daughter was eventually arrested and convicted of the crime.
A sergeant kicked in the front door and at some point Burfine fell to the the ground — the sides disagree on whether she was thrown — and her leg hit a stone pillar. When the settlement was finalized in September, Haddad released a 12-minute video excerpt of the encounter, which showed Burfine screaming in pain.
Within 24 hours, Haddad had Burfine take down the video she had posted after discovering that the video should not have been publicly released as he had previously thought. But the video, which was re-posted by news organizations including the Bay Area News Group, already had been widely distributed on the Internet.
The city of Santa Clara and its police department contend that the video was strategically edited, with Chief Michael Sellers telling KBCW that it “conveniently stopped at the point she admitted that it was an accident,” according to the court filing containing Cousins’ ruling. The defendants also argued that the video release put the officers at risk, a claim that Cousins rejected on the basis that their actions occurred in plain sight and any alleged harm was “outweighed by the public interest in transparency.”
In the wake of the settlement, Sellers said in a statement that “if this case were brought to court, we would have provided evidence and testimony demonstrating that our officers’ actions were fully within the law and in accordance with accepted police practices … It’s disappointing to not have that opportunity. I fully support the police officers who acted in good faith to arrest this arsonist wanted on felony charges.”
City Attorney Brian Doyle, also in a post-settlement statement, acknowledged that the officers did not have a warrant when they forced entry into Burfine’s home, and a city statement contested the extent of Burfine’s injuries, which Haddad said included Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, a chronic pain condition.
Haddad said he understood the court’s order that his firm pay the city’s legal fees — due Wednesday — to litigate the video release, and was heartened by the broader ruling.
“The judge made the point that the video should have always been made public, but there was a court order making it confidential and everyone has to obey court orders,” he said. “He was making a point to us and all other litigants that you must never disobey a court order, even by accident.”