WOODLAND — For the third time, Yolo County prosecutors entered a courtroom Tuesday seeking the jailhouse medical records for Samantha Lee Green, the Woodland woman facing second-degree murder charges for the death of her infant son last year.
And for the third time, they were denied.
“I have not found sufficient authority that would compel the court to breach the patient-physician privilege at this time,” Yolo Superior Court Judge David Rosenberg said in denying Deputy District Attorney Ryan Couzens’ motion to reconsider, echoing similar rulings he made back in June and again in July.
Rosenberg said that could change, however, should Green’s defense team switch their client’s plea from not guilty to not guilty by reason of insanity or otherwise raise a diminished-capacity defense at trial — either of which would put her mental state in the spotlight.
At issue are the 23-year-old Green’s medical and psychological records at the Yolo County Jail, where she has been housed since her arrest on Feb. 28, 2015 — three days after searchers found the body of her 19-day-old son Justice Rees on the bank of Ridge Cut Slough in Knights Landing.
Yolo County sheriff’s detectives filed a search warrant for the records the following week, saying they were “essential for this criminal investigation to better understand (her) mental and physical state following her arrest.”
But Green’s attorneys fought back, arguing in a motion to quash, or void, the warrant that it violated Green’s privacy rights as well as attorney-client privilege, particularly since a special master had not been appointed to maintain the confidentiality of the documents.
Rosenberg agreed, and the records were lodged with the court. The judge ruled against the District Attorney’s Office a second time in July after investigators again gained access to the documents, this time with a special master.
The matter appeared to be settled until Green’s four-day preliminary hearing in November, when, according to prosecutors, her attorneys repeatedly questioned witnesses about Green’s mental state and methamphetamine use around the time of her son’s death. Couzens also noted in court documents that Green repeatedly sought out sheriff’s investigators against the advice of her attorney “to talk about all aspects of her mental state.”
Sheriff’s detectives Dean Nyland and Hernan Oviedo, who interviewed Green last March and April, wrote declarations saying Green claimed to have been drugged by her fiancé, Frank Rees, and that she harbored various delusions that someone was trying to harm her baby when she drove him to the slough area.
“Although there is a psychotherapist-patient privilege that potentially applies, that privilege does not apply where the defense ‘tenders’ the issue of her mental or emotional state in the litigation,” Couzens wrote in his motion. In court Tuesday, he said: “The entire trial is going to be about mental state, and we need the ability to be prepared.”
But Public Defender Tracie Olson disagreed, saying that neither her client’s statements to law enforcement nor the line of questioning in court constitutes the “tendering” of a mental condition.
“It’s not supported by any case law,” Olson said. As for Green’s admitted drug use, “just because someone is under the influence doesn’t mean you can go get psychiatric records that are otherwise privileged.”
Asked directly by Rosenberg whether she is contemplating an insanity plea for her client, Olson said she is not. The judge sided with her a short time later.
Couzens didn’t leave the courtroom entirely empty-handed, however. At his request, Rosenberg set a deadline of March 30 for Green’s lawyers to submit their witness list so that prosecutors can prepare for any defense experts on mental state or substance abuse in time for the April 25 trial start.
And, should Green opt to pursue an insanity defense after all, Rosenberg gave her until April 6 to change her plea.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene