WOODLAND — With less than a month to go before trial, the attorneys for a Woodland woman accused of causing the death of her infant son want the Yolo County District Attorney’s Office barred from prosecuting the murder case.
Public Defender Tracie Olson and Deputy Public Defender David Muller, who represent Samantha Lee Green, say prosecutors retained “personal and privileged information” regarding their client — namely, jailhouse psychological records — despite a judge’s order to destroy it or turn it over to the court.
“It is asserted that this breach of confidentiality has now led their office into a position where they cannot fairly administrate justice … due to their receipt of this otherwise confidential and privileged information,” Olson and Muller wrote in a recusal motion filed last Friday.
An evidentiary hearing on the issue is set for April 11, two weeks before the scheduled start of Green’s trial. Prosecutors declined to comment on the motion Tuesday, citing a gag order imposed in the case, but are preparing a written response.
At issue are Green’s medical and psychological records at the Yolo County Jail, where she has been held since February 2015 after allegedly keeping her 3-week-old son Justice Rees overnight on the bank of a Knights Landing slough while under the influence of drugs, resulting in the baby’s death from exposure, dehydration and pre-existing heart defects.
Anticipating a possible diminished-capacity defense due to Green’s ongoing use of methamphetamine and marijuana, the Yolo County Sheriff’s Office twice served warrants to obtain her jailhouse medical records and delivered them to the DA’s office. Judge David Rosenberg later voided the warrants, citing patient-physician privilege.
In his first ruling, on June 2, Rosenberg gave the DA’s office two weeks to submit the records to the court for sealing or have them destroyed.
(Deputy District Attorney Ryan Couzens, one of two prosecutors assigned to the Green case, recently filed a writ with the Third District Court of Appeals seeking a review of Rosenberg’s most recent ruling in January in which he declined to reconsider his prior decisions.)
According to the recusal motion, the case’s attorneys were in the midst of a scheduling meeting in Rosenberg’s chambers on March 18 when Couzens disclosed he had instructed a DA investigator, Jennifer Davis, to prepare a summary of Green’s psychological records following the June ruling, and that “this summary was uploaded onto their computer network where anyone within their office had access to those records.”
Olson and Muller also noted that the DA’s witness list for the Green trial includes 29 employees of the California Forensic Medical Group, the medical provider for Yolo County Jail inmates, an indication that “the People have retained and are still utilizing (the) defendant’s privileged and confidential records in their prosecution.”
While admittedly a “radical step,” recusal of the DA’s office “is the only feasible way this defendant will be assured of receiving fair settlement negotiations, a fair preliminary examination, and ultimately a fair trial should it come to that eventually,” the motion says.
Disqualification of the DA’s office would put the case in the hands of the state attorney general. But one legal expert says Green’s attorneys have an uphill battle ahead.
“My guess is the public defender’s office’s odds are not good in disqualifying the whole (DA’s) office, unless they can prove there was widespread, deliberate malfeasance,” said John E.B. Myers, a criminal law professor at McGeorge School of the Law in Sacramento.
Myers said Green’s lawyers have a better shot at having the case’s currently assigned prosecutors removed and replaced with attorneys who have been “walled off” from the privileged information — an alternative suggested by Olson and Muller in their motion.
Olson has said in court that she is not contemplating an insanity or other diminished-capacity defense for Green, but Rosenberg gave her until April 6 to change that decision. He also set a deadline for Wednesday for Green’s attorneys to submit their anticipated witness list so that prosecutors could prepare for any possible defense experts on mental state or substance abuse.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene