Union Ordered to Pay Court Fees

A judge Friday ordered a union for Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies to pay $56,000 in attorney fees to a coalition that opposed the union’s efforts to seal information -- including normally confidential records -- generated when deputies appeal disciplinary cases to the county’s Civil Service Commission.

The fees, plus $1,365 in court costs, must be paid to the Los Angeles Times, California Newspaper Publisher’s Assn. and Rich McKee, a longtime 1st Amendment advocate and president of the group Californians Aware.

The parties had intervened in a lawsuit filed earlier this year by the Assn. of Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs, which represents thousands of deputies, seeking to stop the county’s practice of making such records available to the public once employees asked for reviews of their cases before the Civil Service Commission.

The union says state law requires that information about sworn law enforcement officials be kept private. It sued shortly after The Times requested the information in January.

A Superior Court judge briefly sealed the files of four deputies -- all sought by The Times -- while the larger legal issues were considered. That stay was lifted in February, and union attorneys have appealed.

Several pending cases, including one now under consideration by the California Supreme Court, deal with how far privacy protections for police officers should extend: Does state law provide sweeping confidentiality for law enforcement officials even when they appeal disciplinary decisions in forums that traditionally have been public?

The award of fees and costs Friday by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Irving Feffer was hailed as significant by attorneys for The Times because it was made even though the coalition opposing the union’s lawsuit was not a direct party in the case. When the court makes such a ruling involving a party to a case, such fees and costs are automatically awarded.

Susan Seager of the law firm Davis, Wright Tremaine, who represented The Times, said the union’s actions, in effect, were an attempt to block the public’s access to information. That, she argued, entitled the coalition to be compensated for its efforts to keep the records available.

“Our position is that this was a reverse Public Records Act lawsuit by the union. We intervened to defend the public’s right of access to the commission’s records,” she said.

Richard A. Shinee, who represented the union, said he would recommend that his client appeal, calling the awarding of fees and costs “excessive and not warranted.”

Shinee said his clients hope that future court rulings will close the files from public view.

“We attempted not to block access to records but to enforce the right of confidentiality of police officer records,” he said. “I don’t think that this idea of freedom of information trumps the right of an employee to have confidentiality in terms of his employment.”