Further to today’s earlier post about California attempting to hold on to inmate firefighters who could otherwise be eligible for parole under a court order, BuzzFeed News reported: (brackets by the Wrongologist)
[While] lawyers for California Attorney General Kamala Harris argued releasing non-violent inmates early would harm efforts to fight California wildfires, Harris told BuzzFeed News she first heard about this when she read it in the paper.
So, the inevitable question: What did she know, and when did she know it? BuzzFeed quotes Harris:
I will be very candid with you, because I saw that article this morning, and I was shocked, and I’m looking into it to see if the way it was characterized in the paper is actually how it occurred in court…I was very troubled by what I read. I just need to find out what did we actually say in court.
She’s reduced to arguing that she had no idea that her office went into court and argued that they could not comply with a court order to reduce the prison population because they needed the cheap labor to combat wildfires. Her argument defies believability. A legal department has a case list. It is reviewed with the higher-ups on a periodic basis. Her acknowledging that she knew nothing about it isn’t credible, we are talking about compliance with a Supreme Court decision. You would have to believe that her underlings didn’t let her know about, and weigh in on, what they were doing in a high profile case that had been ongoing since 2011.
What exactly does she pay attention to, if not issues like this? Who decided to appeal the order? It doesn’t speak very well of her management process if she didn’t know what was going on.
But, unless she fires those who she says hid the news, there is no reason to believe that she actually disapproves of the position the state took to hold on to as many as 4,400 inmate firefighters.
I believe her. I have worked for three large insurers, each had diverse operations (individual life, group medical, investments etc) and thousands of employees. It is not hard to imagine that the have large numbers of lawyers engaged in answering motions of all sorts (as insurers do) and that sometimes you have surprises. The reports that upper management gets summarize dollars but cannot tell the gritty detail. and yes the managements is flawed but decades ago at a Prudential we settled a lawsuit on a $25,000 death claim where the legal costs were over $30,000. We should have paid. I know that that example is not at all like the CA one, but trust me, its hard to manage legal matters.
@ Terry: I take your point that there are tons of cases to try to follow, and that delegation is the only way to be sure that everything gets done.
BUT, this case involves downstream actions from a Supreme Court decision. The state’s argument was bound to be picked up by a-holes like the Wrongologist, who see the implausibility of an argument to keep certain inmates past their early parole date because the state makes money off of their services.
It is hard to choose which is worse for Ms. Harris, knowing and backing her team’s play, or not knowing and finding out in the press.
One thing that makes the case for ignorance (for me) is the reflexive behavior of all legal entities when defending themselves. For example, in the old Central Park Jogger case, the state even went so far as to try to penalize reporters who exposed a terrible injustice. Or in the Obama administration, defending the spying that the previous administration started – even when it goes against the beliefs of their base.
Again, i don’t what to suggest that I really know for sure, but I work closely with in house lawyers and i see it in our own hard defense on cases that are, in the end, trivial.